


Dead Men Rise Up Sometimes

by cgner



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Pushing Daisies Fusion, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-07-21 20:27:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7402729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cgner/pseuds/cgner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lily Evans leads a simple life of making pies and waking the dead. She doesn't wake them for good, mind – only for a minute, until she and Sirius can find out who killed them. Their latest case: James Potter, moneyed heir, messy haired, and recent murder victim. Keeping him alive is a terrible idea. Too bad Lily's always been a bit reckless.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Men Rise Up Sometimes

**Author's Note:**

> This is a jily story set in the Pushing Daisies universe. You don't need to have seen the show to read this. 
> 
> As a heads up, the prose in this piece is a little different than my usual. I tried to blend my own style with the very distinctive Pushing Daisies narrative voice. The title is a play on a line from "The Garden of Proserpine" by Charles Algernon Swinburne.
> 
> My shout-outs: Allison, thank you for suggesting a Pushing Daisies AU; I accidentally wrote a novella. Ayesha, thank you for your suggestions on tying in more canon and on titles. Karaline, thank you for your thoughtful, helpful comments on how to improve things, and for catching my errors. Linds, thank you for your encouragement and for helping me nail the emotions; you were with me in my apartment when I started this and that's super cool.

**prologue.**

_Three._

Lily’s heart galloped in her chest.

_Two._

She imagined her fingertips tingling.

_One._

Truly, she should have been used to this by now.

_Zero._

The second hand ticked over the ornately-lettered twelve on Lily’s watch. She brushed a finger over Podmore’s hand, which lay cold and ashen in death. The moment she made contact, he launched into a sitting position, his eyes flying open. The white sheet that had covered him pooled in his lap while his hands rushed to his throat.

“Hi,” Lily offered.

Sirius grunted behind her.

Sturgis Podmore, age forty-three years, five months, and ten days at the time of his demise, tried to suck in a few breaths, but his lungs persistently failed to fill. After scrabbling against nothing but skin, his fingers withdrew from his throat, but they didn’t stray far, lingering nearby. In Lily’s experience, this was a common enough habit in strangulation victims.

She waved at Podmore, and his attention finally shifted to something other than his inability to breathe.

_Fifty seconds._

“Hello,” she said, “I’m Lily, and this grunty sod behind me is Sirius. We’ve got less than a minute before I touch you again and you’re off for good. Would you like to tell us who killed you?”

Podmore took in the hexagonal-tiled floor, the fluorescent lighting, and the unmistakable wall of large, metal drawers from which his perch protruded. His face fell, but only for a moment. Then he nodded with enthusiasm, and opened his mouth to speak.

He managed a faint wheeze, and nothing more.

“Shite,” muttered Sirius.

Violet bruises spiraled around Podmore’s neck in a thick coil. Whatever the murder weapon had been—it had the wrong imprint for rope—it had put an end to both his life and his capacity for speech.

Podmore mimed writing something out with a pen, a hopeful look in his basset hound eyes.

“Damn,” Lily said, patting down the pockets on her sunshine-yellow trench coat. “Sirius?”

She turned to find him scrounging through his pockets, but he only withdrew a few loose coins, his sparse ring of keys, and a sad piece of gum in worn silver wrapping. Lily stepped forward to snatch the gum from his hands and hurried to unwrap it.

“Pen!” she said.

At the tinny sound of a palm slapping on metal, she paused, turning back to Podmore. His other hand was miming sliding across his throat in the universal sign for _cut._

“What is it?” she asked, glancing at her watch.

_Thirty seconds._

Her heart hurtled against her ribs.

Podmore beckoned Lily over and smoothed out the sheet on his lap. She rushed back to watch him draw slow, deliberate letters on the sheet.

“V,” Lily said, eyes following the lines traced out by his stubby fingers. “O. L. D.”

She wondered if the suffocation had damaged his brain in addition to his throat.

 _Twenty seconds_.

“Hurry,” she pleaded, and Podmore sped up his writing. “E. M. O. R. T.”

 _Ten seconds_.

“Vold—something,” she said, struggling to recall the letters in order. “I’m sorry, Sturgis, I can’t—”

He began to race through the letters once more.

_Four seconds._

“Voldemort,” Sirius said.

Podmore only had time to start on a nod when Lily slapped her hand over his, sending him into a collapse, his body smacking against the metal drawer.

Lily pressed a palm to her chest and breathed a sigh of relief. After a few moments she looked down at Podmore, his sad eyes now closed for good.

“Voldemort,” Lily said to herself as she rearranged his body into its original position, and pulled the sheet over him. “Voldemort….”

She turned back to Sirius, who was leaning a shoulder against the wall of drawers, legs crossed at the ankle. His mouth slanted.

“One word,” he said. “One bloody word in sixty seconds.”

“Well, at least we didn’t try charades again. We’d never have guessed that one.”

Sirius sighed. “Right then. Voldemort. Flight from death. What are the odds it’s a unique rope made in one shop in London?”

Lily glanced down at Podmore one more time, and pushed his drawer into the wall.

“For once,” she said, “I wish we’d get a straightforward name and address. Maybe a national insurance number or license plate for good measure.”

“Nah.” Sirius grinned at her, and together they walked out of the morgue. “Where’s the fun in that?”

\--

**dead men rise up sometimes.**

A tremendous bolt of energy surged into James’s cheek. It radiated through his body, crackling along his limbs, bringing every nerve ending he had into full, tingling awareness.

He bolted upright, his jaw dropping as he sucked in lungfuls of air, his hands grasping the sides of the strange box he was in. It took approximately three-quarters of a second for him to regain the most critical piece of his bearings: _Someone was trying to kill him_.

He hurled himself out of the box, stumbling a bit and struggling with the restricted movement induced by his slim-fitting suit.

His suit? He hadn’t been wearing one of those.

“James,” came a cautious but familiar voice.

He stopped focusing on the peculiar taste in his mouth, the suit that he did not remember purchasing, and the unusual cleanliness of his glasses, to pay attention to the red-haired, green-eyed woman standing in front of him.

“Lily?” he blurted, and then caught himself. He straightened his stance, ran a hand through his hair, and cleared his throat. “I mean, er, all right, Evans?”

She laughed once, short and loud. “I’d forgotten you used to call me that. No one else ever has.”

She’d of course grown since he’d last seen her, but she’d become no less lovely in the intervening years. Her hair was longer, her body now shapelier, but her smile had not changed one bit.

And he found, not unpleasantly, that her presence had the same impact on him as it had in their childhood: racing heart, fluttering stomach, and a desire, above all else, to make her laugh.

“Yeah, well,” James said, trying and failing to come up with some clever retort. “Sorry, I’m trying to come up with a clever retort but nothing’s come to mind.”

“That’s a first,” she said, and then her expression shifted to something like embarrassed. “The thing is—d’you know what’s happening right now?”

James turned back to the box he’d climbed out of. The lidded, polished wood box with a padded, cream-colored interior.

The oxygen seemed to vanish from the room.

“Am I _dead_?” he squawked. He wished it had come out in a manlier tone, but there was the more pressing matter to deal with of the fact that he was, apparently, deceased.

“Not at this exact moment, no,” she said, “but you _were_ dead until a few seconds ago. You were, well, kind of…murdered.”

James’s laugh came out rather shrill. “I thought there was only one degree of murdered, which is fully.”

He looked down to marvel at his hands, hands he had just been using to pour his morning coffee.

Coffee that had killed him.

“Someone poisoned my coffee,” he said.

Lily gave a reluctant nod. “We’ve only got sixty seconds to talk – do you know who did it? Or who might’ve wanted to?”

James’s mind raced through the people that had ever disliked him, or at least enough that they might have tried to murder him.

He very nearly came up short, but not quite.

“Snape,” he said. “Severus Snape.”

Her mouth tilted. “Snape?”

“He’s the only bloke who’s ever really hated me….”

“Right, then. Snape. Any other ideas?”

His mind had been temporarily converted into a silent, cavernous chamber.

She glanced down at her watch. “We haven’t got much time—”

The time limit made no sense but neither did any of this—and if this were truly the end, the end for good, then he had to—

“Look, Lily,” he said, “I never got to tell you—when I lived next door to you, I had a cru—I was in—you were my first kiss.”

“Ha! I knew you were lying about Isabella Marks.”

“Hey, that was a near thing, if Algernon hadn’t shown up—it doesn’t matter,” he said, watching her eyes flick down to her wrist.

She took a step forward. “You were mine, too, only—I’m sorry, I have to touch you now,” she said, looking as though this were horrific news, instead of a wonderful turn of events. “It’ll make you dead again.”

James said: “Oh.”

He barely managed to stand his ground as she raised a hand toward him, fingers outstretched.

“Then kiss me?” he said, only because he had nothing to lose. He was dead. Had been dead. _Would_ be dead again in a second, and possibly, this time, of embarrassment. “Or is that weird. First and last….”

She grinned. “You cheeky bugger.”

“That wasn’t a no.”

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t.”

She closed the gap between them with two steps and tilted her head back to look at him, her eyes wide and bright.

This was it, then. At least he got to kiss Lily Evans once more before he died for good. He’d spent years warmly recalling their first and only kiss, full of hormones and grief, at their respective parents’ funerals.

He lowered his head, and she stood up on her toes, their lips a mere inch apart.

He closed his eyes, savoring the swell of air in his lungs, the reassuring pounding of his heart, and the sweet, subtle scent of Lily Evans in front of him.

“What,” Lily breathed, “if you didn’t have to be dead?”

James opened his eyes, and said, without really thinking about it, “Then I could kiss you a lot more.”

She laughed, her hand coming up to smother it, but he savored it while it lasted. Then she lowered her hand to reveal a small, impish grin.

“I should kiss you right now,” she said.

“Then do it?” he said, brow furrowing. “Or don’t. If it’ll kill me. I mean, I don’t know why I have to be dead if I couldn’t be…or why you’re the decider…are you dead, too?”

Lily shook her head, but she wasn’t looking at him, her attention now on the coffin. His coffin.

“Hang on,” he said, “is this one of those hidden camera shows, because if so I definitely will want a kiss—”

She shushed him, her eyes oddly alight. “No, what we’ll do—we can’t let him—oh, no, but I can’t—” She checked her watch, and swallowed hard. “That’s it, then. You’ll just—hop in the coffin, and I’ll get you out of here….”

If anyone else had told him to jump into a coffin, James might have had several choice words for them, but two decades apart had done nothing to erode his confidence in Lily’s improvisational planning skills.

Trust only went so far, though – he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking as he clambered back in. It made complete sense that the coffin fit his length perfectly, but it was still utterly eerie, a vivid nightmare come to life.

“I’ve got to leave for a second,” Lily said, “but then I’ll come right back for you. Promise.”

James nodded, his throat tight. He debated clasping his hands over his chest in the classic pose, but that seemed too much like inviting death back into the room.

Lily smiled as she closed the lid over him, the light from the room shrinking down to a narrow strip, and then vanishing altogether.

\--

Lying in the dark, his coffin jostling as a pair of disgruntled men shifted it around, James thought back about his years spent with Lily Evans. They’d grown up across the street from each other, and had therefore become best friends based, if nothing else, on sheer proximity. They went on scouting missions in the woods with his cat, followed ants along the street, and splashed heartily in puddles after the rain. In the same tradition of childhood, though, they’d lost contact the moment Lily’s mum had shipped Lily and her sister off to boarding school.

Those few weeks surrounding her departure had been the worst of his life. In a swift, cruel move, the universe had taken James’s mum the same day as Lily’s dad, both adults dropping to the ground within hours of each other. Without Lily there to discuss it with him, James had been left to his own explanations. Had it been fate for them to die so close together? Some strange parasite that had leapt from one body to another before disappearing? Some chemical in the air?

It had taken James many years to come to terms with the fact that it had been nothing more than coincidence. The least exciting explanation, but the truest one.

Lily had disappeared from his life, but not from his thoughts. Technology had made it easier to stay in touch, and over the years he’d considered reaching out to her, but he’d never managed to actually follow through. Perhaps she had never felt the same way as him, or perhaps she preferred to leave him in the past, in the same file she no doubt kept her father’s death.

But here she was, and performing a miracle, no less. Possibly this was the universe’s reparations for the untimely removal of their parents. Or maybe it was, again, coincidence. Either way, James had few complaints.

Except that Lily had said she’d only been gone a second, and it had to have been close to ten minutes since he’d been shut in here. He began to hear the slide of shovels outside, followed by a rain of dirt onto his coffin.

And then Lily’s voice came once more, slightly muffled by the coffin padding: “Hey, I think somebody’s truck is on fire.”

James slapped his hand over his mouth to muffle his laughter, while the two men burying him cursed and ran off.

The lid pried open, revealing Lily’s glorious, smiling face, her hair limned by the afternoon sun behind her. She lay flat on her stomach with her head peeking over the edge of his grave.

“Hello,” she said, a bit short on breath, her face flushed. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“I say, Evans, your idea of _a second_ has really gone to shit over time,” he said. “I’m obligated to ask as an ear witness – did you set their car on fire?”

“No, because that would definitely be illegal,” she said, although this was rather belied by the faint streak of soot curving along her cheekbone.

While she got to her feet, James hauled himself out of his grave. Cool dirt and sun-warm grass had never felt so welcome beneath his fingers.

He turned around to inspect his now-empty coffin, shuddered faintly, and asked, “What now?”

She nodded to her left, her smile never faltering, just as James liked to remember it. “We run for my car before they see you. Unless you’ve another suggestion?”

“Well, I suppose we could go on a full arsonist spree,” James said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “You know, while we’re at it. You only live once. Or twice, depending.”

“Definitely an option, but I do prefer _not_ being jailed. Especially with you just escaping a permanent sort of jail.”

“Fair point,” James said. “Let’s run.”

\--

Once in the car, they kept glancing at each other and dissolving into laughter, as though this were another one of their invented, childhood adventures: Lily and James pull one over on Death himself.

The world seemed altogether too much to take in at once. James rolled down the window to let the summer breeze ruffle up his hair, to inhale the tang of freshly mown grass, to hear the gentle roar of the engine as it pulled them down the street. He hadn’t asked where they were going, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the steady, constant beating of his heart.

He’d been dead.

 _Dead_.

He did not remember being dead. He’d been alive, and then apparently not, but he had no recollection of any strange lights or ethereal voices in between. It felt like one of his black outs during his roaring university days.

And now he was alive.

 _Lily_ _Evans_ , of all people, had brought him back to life.

She deftly parallel parked on a crowded street, and he followed her out of the car and down the pavement, wishing only that he could slip his hand into hers.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“Ravenous,” James said, and for once he rejoiced in that. Hunger was such an _alive_ sensation.

She led him to a peculiar corner, a meeting of three streets that left several triangle-shaped buildings jutting into the intersection. One had an enormous pie crust curling around its corner as an overhang, with bright red letters spelling out _The Pie Hole_ above.

The bell over the door jangled as they entered. Inside James found cozy vinyl booths, a long stretch of dining counter in front of the kitchen, and oversized lamps in the shape of cherries hanging cheerfully from the ceiling. Behind the counter stood three circular tiers filled entirely with pies.

James trailed after Lily, fully expecting her to take a seat, but then she stepped around the counter instead. She shucked off her coat and hung it on a hook on the wall.

“D’you want to start with something savory?” she asked. “I use my dad’s steak and kidney recipe.”

Of _course_ she’d become a pie maker. Her dad had always had a pie in the oven – wonderful ones, too, ones James still compared every pie in his life against and found them wanting.

James eyed the tower of pie. “There’s that saying about life being short and eating pudding first, and having been dead now, I can’t say I really regret any time I ate ice cream for supper.”

“Strawberry, then?”

He found himself grinning. “You remember.”

She fixed him a slice à la mode and slid it across the counter. He moaned after the first bite.

“You bring back the dead _and_ make the best pies?” he said mournfully. “That just doesn’t seem cosmically fair somehow. I can’t even raise one eyebrow without raising the other.”

She glanced around. “Keep quiet on the reanimated corpse bit, all right? It’s not something I pass out pamphlets about on street corners.”

“Ah, yeah,” James said, coloring. “Sorry, I’m just—new to this whole thing.”

“So am I, you know. I’ve never kept someone alive before.”

“What? Why not?”

“Oh, you know how it is. One day you’re the local piemaker, the next everyone’s attacking you with torches and pitchforks, shouting at you for being an abomination. Tale as old as time, that one, and one I’d like to avoid.”

“It’s true, of all the mysterious abilities to have, people might be the most outraged about this one. That, or one that let you jump queues.” He devoured another bite of pie. “How long have you been able to do this?”

She turned to rearrange a pie on the tower, ensuring it was evenly spaced from its neighbors. “I’ve known since about the time I went to boarding school, actually.”

James nodded. “’Cause you’d have brought back our parents otherwise.”

She faced him again, looking somber. “James, you know that I—if I could have done anything to keep them alive, I would have.”

“Yeah, no, I know.”

His next bite of pie felt lumpy on the way down. He couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened if only she’d known about her abilities just a little earlier.

“And in the interest of keeping you here with us on earth,” she said, “you need to know that we can’t touch. The first time I touch you, it brings you back – the second makes you dead again. Forever.”

James considered this. “So a kiss is out of the question?”

She let out a short, pleased laugh. “I forgot about you calling me Evans. The cheekiness was harder to forget. Imprinted on my memory, that.”

“You were game for a kiss earlier.”

“Well, yes, but that was before you didn’t die. Lived. Didn’t not undie. However you’d like to phrase it.”

“So are you saying you _wouldn’t_ want to kiss me now if you could?”

A smile played at her lips, a smile that James found it very difficult not to stand up and kiss. He’d brought that smile into the world, and he wanted to send it off with a fond farewell.

“I didn’t say _that_ ,” she said. “Only that it’d kill you. Like an evil fairy tale.”

“Does that make you a witch?”

“No wand, only fingers,” she said, waggling one hand’s worth at him.

“You have whisked me out of my castle, metaphorically speaking.”

“Oh, right. I think….”Lily rested her elbows on the dining counter, that smile he’d inspired now fading quickly. “You can’t go back to your life, James. No one you know can know you’re alive.” She paused, seemingly struck by something. “You haven’t got a ring, but if there’s someone special, I—”

“No,” he cut in. “I mean, only if my cat counts.”

His _cat_. He’d been alive for more than twenty minutes and had not spared a moment for his own damn cat. He could never let Algernon know this had happened, or James would never hear the end of it.

“I can’t let Algernon think I’m dead if I’m not,” he said. “He’s my _cat_ , surely he can’t tell anyone—”

“I’d never dream of keeping you from Algernon, James. Besides, he’s bound to figure it out sooner or later, knowing him.”

“Is it weird I’m a little surprised he hasn’t already shown up here?”

“It is unlike him to be this slow to adjust to new events,” she agreed. “But anyone else besides him—I know your parents are gone, but any friends, or other relatives….”

“My aunt Minerva,” James said. “She’s got a bad hip and a bad eye, and I go over every couple of days to help sort things out around the house.”

“She can’t know, James.”

“But she’s—she took me in after my mum died, after you got sent away. She raised me. I can’t—”

“James,” Lily said, in a quiet, heavy sort of way, like the closing of a wooden door. “I’m sorry.”

He looked down at his plate, unable to bear the genuine apology in her eyes. He understood, of course, but it still hurt, even more than dying.

He’d never see Minerva’s musty, tartan-filled home again. She’d never been overly affectionate, but she’d done her best to help piece him back together after his life had shattered. She’d scold him whenever he got into some new bit of trouble, ensure he did all his lessons, and make him ginger biscuits. He’d become the person he was in that house, and now he was alive, but not there for her in turn….

His body might not be dead, but the life he’d constructed was.

Although James’s stomach sank, he kept eating the pie. To not eat such a piece of perfection, he reasoned, would have constituted a sin.

“I guess I can’t have my money either,” he said. “Or my things.”

Lily’s hand slid toward his, but then halted. “Imagine I’m holding your hand, if you would.”

James closed his eyes, and pictured her fingers closing the final few inches to brush against his. She’d touched his cheek to bring him back to life. He hadn’t properly appreciated that touch at the time, hadn’t known it would be his last.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve got money – you can have whatever you need. Unless it’s an actual castle. Or pitchforks. I don’t like them lying around, just in case.”

He opened his eyes, swallowing the burst of misery as best he could, and picked up his fork.

“I’ve never been a kept man,” he said, “but I suppose if you’re soliciting applications, I could be persuaded to apply.”

“I hope you’ve got experience if you want to be a competitive candidate. Do you have a CV you’d like to submit?”

James opened his mouth to reply, but then his fork came down on the plate, with no pie in between.

Lily looked down at his tragically empty plate. “Seconds?”

He smiled. “Absolutely.”

\--

While they spoke, a nimble old man strolled between patrons and the kitchen, taking orders and doling out pie. He kept his long beard in order with a thin, silver string, and his pen and paper in a purple server apron around his waist.

As James dug into his second slice of pie, Lily beckoned the man over.

“Albus,” she said, “this is James. He’ll be around a lot from now on.”

Albus’s blue eyes twinkled behind spectacles. “A pleasure. James, was it?”

“That’s me. Sticking around, it seems. Lily’s decided she’d like a kept man.”

“Like a stray pet I’m taking in,” she said airily. “I expect you to keep yourself groomed.”

At the ring of the bell on the door, she glanced over, seemingly out of habit, and then tensed.

James spun his seat around, fork still in hand, to see a scowling man in a leather coat stalking toward them.

“Lily,” James said, getting to his feet, and debating the weapon potential of a fork, “you forgot to mention the competing gang of piemakers you’re in a war with.”

“No rival,” Lily sighed.

“You _left_ me,” the man said to her, “in a _funeral home_.”

“Ah, right, about that,” she said, “something came up, I had to, er….”

“She had to come help me,” James said. “I needed her to, ah, wash my hair. I mean, go to hospital. Wash my hair in a hospital. Really complicated, tragic hair emergency, not the fashion kind, but you know how it goes. Hi, I’m James.”

Albus smiled. “He has an exceptional resemblance to that man who was recently killed.” To James, he added, “Which is, I assure you, a compliment meant with the best intentions.”

“He looks _exactly_ like that man who was recently killed,” said the man in the leather coat, sounding positively murderous.

James’s hand found his way to his hair. “Ah, yeah, I’ve got one of those faces, you know? It’s these glasses, too, they’re wicked popular right now….”

Lily crossed her arms. “It’s the glasses. Definitely the glasses.”

“Lily,” the man said. “A word. _Alone_.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s a word. So’s _flugelhorn._ In fact, that’s a better one, and on so many fronts, too.”

He threw her a withering glare and, without waiting for her, strode into the kitchen. Lily marched in after him.

The large archway separating the kitchen from the dining area didn’t afford much privacy, but it was more than James cared for them to have at the moment. He looked down at his fork, then back up at Lily and Sirius, and tossed the fork back onto his plate with a clatter.

“Fuck it,” he said, and headed through the doorway, leaving Albus by himself.

Sirius was jabbing a finger toward the dining area when James approached.

“Not to be vain,” James said, “but I get the feeling this song is about me.”

“Touch him now,” Sirius told Lily, without looking at James. “This isn’t just beyond stupid, it’s completely out of sight of stupid—”

“Yes,” James said, “it seems it _is_ about me, and your apparent plot to _murder me_ , you complete arse _._ Lily, why does he get to know—”

Sirius swung around to face James. “ _I_ didn’t murder you. Although I wish I knew who had, so if you’ve got some information about that, I’d be over the fucking moon to hear it. And then Lily can touch you, we can get paid, and we can be done with this.”

A chill crept over James’s arms, drawing out goose pimples. He looked to Lily for a rebuttal, but found only guilt.

“That’s why you came to see me?” he asked. “To try to get the reward after I told you who did me in?”

“And to bring justice,” Lily pleaded. “I’m sorry, James, I hadn’t had the chance to tell you about it yet, this wasn’t planned, I just—”

“If I knew who killed me,” James said, his voice notching higher, “would I even be alive right now?”

“No,” Sirius said, at the same time that Lily said, “ _Of course_ you would. I couldn’t kill you, not after you were so _you_ , and alive, and I thought—I couldn’t.”

Her trip to the funeral home hadn’t had a romantic or nostalgic drive at all, but financial. That wasn’t the Lily that James remembered.

She palmed some stray hairs off of her forehead. “Maybe I didn’t _think_. I just acted. I acted without thinking because I knew, somehow, that…well, the world would be a better place with you in it.”

James’s heart, which had shuttered so quickly at Sirius’s pronouncement, now swelled.

He swore.

“You _cheater_ ,” he said. “You absolute cheater.”

A small line formed on Lily’s forehead.

“ _How_ ,” James continued, “am I supposed to stay angry with you when you say something like that? It’s absolutely uncalled for.”

“Well, it’s _true_.”

“Yes, but I can’t win an argument against it.”

“ _Sirius_ and I were arguing. Or rather he was shouting at me. I didn’t realize you and I were arguing, too.”

“We were—well, no, I was also ready to shout at you. Now I’ve lost my chance. And I do love shouting.”

“That part I also remember about you. Sometimes less fondly, specifically when it was _in my ear_.”

“That was only a couple of times, and once was because of a bee, and I know how you feel about bees.”

“I love bees now, thank you. I keep some on the roof. Honey infused crusts are trending right now.”

James took in the stubborn lift of Lily’s chin and the hint of a curl at the corner of her lips, at once familiar and distant, a pose he knew on a body he did not. He’d known every bend of her personality at nine. Those structures, though, had shifted. He had to learn them anew, which was no unwelcome task.

Her habits were unchanged enough for him to understand, without even needing to actively process, that she was experiencing a similar realization, her eyes flicking over him, her faint smile softening.

They were their child selves, and yet they were not.

“Lovely for you two to be able to catch up,” Sirius said, “but here are three one-way tickets back to the point. Who killed Potter?”

“Shut it, Sirius,” Lily said, her eyes on James. “We’re having a moment.”

At the exact second that James had the thought, he said, “I really wish I could kiss you right now.”

“In an angry way or in an appreciative way?” she asked.

James thought it over, and said, “Mixed."

Sirius made a show of looking around. “I am actually going to sick up. Lily, d’you have a preference of where I do it? I know I can’t make the fruit less appealing, so if you’d like I could go in the fridge—”

“I’d like to exchange my one-way ticket,” James snapped, “so that you can have a one-way ticket out the door because I feel very safe in assuming that _this doesn’t concern you_.”

“It _does_ concern me,” Sirius said, “when she puts _my_ life at risk, which she did, and she _knows_ it—”

Lily said nothing.

Lily never allowed anyone, let alone any man, to rail against her or her friends this way. Lily never let anyone berate her, save for instance where she was, actually, in the wrong.

Except James being alive shouldn’t have negatively affected Lily’s friends.

Unless.

James looked between the two of them. “Wait, are you two—you’re not….”

“Business partners,” Lily supplied. “He’s a private investigator, one who should deduce that yeah, I took a risk, but it worked out fine.”

Sirius snarled. “It’s _not_ fine, but I can see you’re not in a rational frame of mind right now—”

“I can’t undo what I did,” she told him. “I know that. I made that choice and I’m going to have to live with it.”

Sirius and Lily stared at each other. James supposed Sirius wouldn’t want Lily to take unnecessary risks – if she were found out, he’d lose his very valuable, one-of-a-kind business partner.

For someone else, James might have gone over all chivalrous, might have defended Lily’s choice to Sirius, but Lily Evans saved herself. And, often, James.

Also, she had abandoned Sirius at a funeral home. James would have been dead upset about that, had he been in Sirius’s position.

He decided he might have to start using adverbs other than “dead.” It now seemed oddly inappropriate.

“Never again,” Lily promised. “I’ll start doing fifty seconds if it makes you more comfortable.”

Sirius’s hands clenched into fists. “This conversation isn’t over, but I need to go see a man about some yarn before I do something stupid. Less stupid than you, mind.”

“I’m sorry, all right? I really am. You know I would—you know I didn’t want _you_ —you know. And for good measure: _I’m sorry._ ”

“Yeah,” Sirius said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “You should be.”

He stalked out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and slammed the front door on his way out, the bell going mad with excitement.

“Did he just say he was going to see a man about some yarn?” James asked.

Lily slouched back against a wide marble-top island. “He knits.”

“And here I thought I had him pegged. I was going to guess he’d read drama at university.”

She sent him a weak smile. “That would require him to try to be anyone but himself.”

“You shouldn’t have left him at the funeral home,” James offered. “In the future, you shouldn’t do that to people. They feel left behind.”

“Of that whole conversation, you think that’s what he’s most upset about?”

“Oh yes.”

“Oh, well, if you think so.”

“I do,” James said. “But I also think if being left behind is the worst thing that’s ever happened to him, then I would like to remind him of the dramatic conclusion of my life story.”

“It wasn’t the conclusion,” Lily said, pushing herself off the island and heading back into the dining area. “Or have you forgotten the part where I saved you?”

James followed after her, grinning. “Never,” he said. “Promise.”

\--

After the shop had closed, Lily took James upstairs to her flat. While she found him something to wear besides his death suit, he explored her rooms, taking in the bright, abstract paintings on the walls, the happy, verdant plants near the windows, and the expansive, diverse book collection that took up five bookshelves (no murder mysteries, but loads of romance).

Dressed in pajama bottoms, fuzzy socks, and a loose t-shirt, James occupied one end of her sofa, the evening news playing out in front of him on mute. Lily sat at the other end, absently drawing her fingers through her long hair. She’d kept it short for a while as a girl, but James much preferred it as it was now, falling in soft waves around her face and tumbling over her shoulders. It looked properly soft. He’d never know for sure, though. Not if he wanted to keep living.

He forced himself to stop staring at her.

“So,” he said, “you and Sirius, what, wake up murder victims, ask them who killed them, and collect the reward?”

“Got it in one. It’s a nice bit of money on the side for me, but Sirius is a full-time P.I.”

“Are you two still planning to go Sherlock Holmes on my murder? Wait, you’re not Watson, are you? I get the feeling you’re Watson in this dynamic.”

“It’s his show, which is perfectly fine by me,” she said, “but we can leave this case alone if you want to move on. I’ve got really good at the moving business over the years. Thinking of going professional, actually. Got the radio ads scripted and everything.”

For precisely half a second, James considered the offer to leave his murder alone. He could start over without having to face the reality of betrayal in his former life. He’d never have to know exactly who’d hated him enough to poison his coffee.

Truly, though, there was only one choice for him.

“No moving company needed here,” he said. “Looking for justice and possibly vengeance services. Don’t suppose you’ve a phone book around here?”

“No need to ring anyone – we can definitely help with that.”

“You two must be terrifically successful. How’ve they not made a TV show about you yet?”

“Sirius handles nearly everything by design – Sherlock can have all the attention, as far as I’m concerned. He’s just seen as a very effective P.I. My job is to wake the dead and otherwise stay under the radar.”

“Probably a good idea – might get radiation poisoning if you got too close, or whatever it is you get from being exposed to radar. If anything.”

“Like I said, torches, pitchforks. Maybe some flamethrowers if they want to get modern about it.”

“Worse ways to go than poisoning,” James said. “Oh. Is that morbid, for me to joke about my own death?”

“Not morbid, no. Eccentric, maybe.”

“More or less eccentric than being undead?”

“Alive again,” Lily corrected. “Undead is un-something, and you’re not un-anything. Un-boring, maybe. You’re alive. Again.”

“I’m not going to start craving brains, am I?”

“Only if you wanted them before.”

“But if I’m the first you’ve ever kept alive, how can you be sure?”

“First human,” she said. “I’ve done tests on fireflies and things, and they all seemed fine.”

“Did any of them fly at your face? They might’ve wanted brains. Did they try to get in your ear? Or maybe your mouth—”

“James.”

“Hm?”

“We don’t have to solve the case if you don’t want to.”

Hardly anyone had ever cottoned on to James stalling before – only his aunt, and Lily before her. He pressed his palm against his forehead, eyes shut, breath held. Then he let his hand fall.

“No, we’re doing it. I just—do whatever you do at the start of a case.”

“We usually start with whoever the victim thinks did it,” she said. “Did you say you thought someone named Snape might’ve done it?”

James hadn’t had time to speculate on who’d poisoned him while he’d been on his kitchen floor with his stomach cramping and his heart sputtering to a halt. He’d been more concerned with the fact that his telephone was in the other room, far out of reach, and that he needed to croak out a weak goodbye to Algernon.

In the funeral home, he’d thrown out Snape’s name without thought, his mind a frenzy of _I’m dead_ and _LILY EVANS_ and _I’M DEAD_. But giving it further attention now, he still couldn’t come up with any other suspect.

“Severus Snape,” James said. “He’s a bloke from work, does chemistry stuff. I oversee his division.”

“Tall, black hair, prominent nose—”

“You know him?”

“We went to Hogwarts together.”

James’s face contorted. “I can’t decide if that’s better or worse than working with him. Unless he was more normal back then, and what he’s got now is an unfortunate adult-onset personality.”

She threw James a pointed look. “He was my best friend there.”

“ _Him_?”

“Yes, _him_.”

“Wait, are you still friends with that prick?”

“Ditch the name-calling, please, but no. It was….I realized some—I ended things.”

James sank back into the throw pillows behind him, his mouth unable to close all the way.

Snape. And _Lily_.

Not dating, thankfully. Or hopefully not. But still. _Friends._

“I knew you’d need mates after me,” he said, “and obviously no one could live up to my standard, but _him_?”

“Yes,” she said. “Him.”

James had many questions, beginning with _how_ and ending with _why,_ but Lily’s tone conveyed a strict sense of finality.

She went on, “And you were his boss?”

“His boss’s boss, but yeah.”

Lily’s eyebrows twitched up. “Manager – that’s a bit of a high position for someone our age, isn’t it?”

“It was my parents’ company. Not that I haven’t worked hard, mind, but they’ve been good to me for obvious reasons.”

“Didn’t your parents’ company make hair products?”

“Originally, yeah, but we’ve expanded a lot since then.”

He withheld several remarks on the irony of Snape potentially working on hair care products.

“Why do you think Snape might’ve killed you?” she asked.

“Well, it’s not like I had scads of enemies and tried to avoid dark alleys any more than the usual bloke. Plus, you know, he threatened me.”

“When?”

“Couple months ago. I wanted to cut a project he was working on—it wasn’t worth the financial investment—and he said I’d regret it if I did.”

“That’s…ominous.”

“I thought so. And I just don’t know who else would have motive. It’s worth starting with him, right? You know more about this stuff than I do.”

She gave a reluctant nod. “It sounds like he’s the best starting point, even if it’s only to eliminate him as a suspect.”

James, too, would have had a difficult time believing his friends capable of murder. Then again, his circle of friends did not include anyone as intolerable as Severus Snape.

“D’you think he’d be capable of killing me?” he asked, because it did not matter what he believed if Lily weren’t open to a real investigation.

“Honestly….” She shifted in her seat, the lamp behind her head giving her a faint halo. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think he did.”

“But there’s a chance he could have, right?”

She didn’t answer at once, worrying her lip.

“It’s…not impossible,” she said. “Only murder’s a bit of a drastic step to take over something as dry as budget cuts.”

There was hope for the case, then. Not that discovering who murdered him would necessarily make James feel any better about being undead. Or alive again, or whatever term best described his circumstances. But at least finding the truth would ideally put someone behind bars, unable to harm anyone else.

James found he rather liked the idea of Snape behind bars.

While he mused, Lily’s expression shifted, her eyes now studying James’s face.

“What?” he asked. “Has my hair got so good-looking that it sends people into a stupor?”

“You need a haircut,” she said. “No, it’s only…I never pictured you as a corporate manager. Budgets and research and all that. You wanted to be a policeman, I thought. Or a frog.”

“I stopped chasing the frog thing a long time ago—”

“Did it hop away too quickly?”

“Please, I can outrun a frog.”

“But you can’t outrun the filth?”

“I bet I could, but I didn’t stop chasing so much as…I was still thinking about it, but then I finished uni and the company came calling, and I thought—this was my parents’ work. They wanted to make things to help people. And I figured, well, that’s not so bad. I could do that.”

“You found a way to be close to them.”

James ducked his head, one hand ruffling up his hair. She’d always had his number, known it before he’d even figured it out, and yet he kept forgetting this fact, her insights shooting straight through him.

“I mean, yeah,” he said, “if you want to—I mean, you’re not wrong, I just never put it so bluntly.”

“Well, I became obsessed with pies, so it’s not like you’re alone in the weird-about-dead-parents thing.”

“Oh. Did your mum….”

“She was in an accident. She’s alive, technically, but not…not how it matters. Even if she did die, the brain damage means I couldn’t….”

James’s stomach dropped. The words _I’m sorry_ popped into his mouth, but remained there, unused. They seemed wholly inadequate for anything related to death. People treated _I’m sorry_ like it was a necessary acknowledgement, but he couldn’t entirely begrudge them that. There simply was nothing better to say, and saying nothing made people uncomfortable.

What he would have preferred to do was to hold Lily’s hand in sympathy—because they did understand this about each other, this permanent loss—or perhaps even to offer a warm hug. Human contact was, in so many cases, a much more effective salve than words.

Unfortunately, anything of the sort was out of the question.

Instead, James snatched a throw pillow from behind him and pressed it against his chest, wrapping his arms around it.

“Hug by proxy,” he explained.

“You’re so weird.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

She wasn’t smiling, not really, but it seemed to be lurking nearby, if only he could coax it out.

And he could. He knew he could.

“The reason I stopped wanting to be a frog,” he said, tucking the pillow behind him, “is that my aunt said she’d only feed me flies, and not chips like I’d planned.”

That drew her smile out of hiding, and something in him felt whole. Complete.

“I can’t believe it never occurred to you,” she said, “that you could have been a police frog.”

“Wait,” he said, leaning in toward her, resting his forearms on his knees. “Wait wait wait. D’you mean like how the police use dogs, or d’you mean a frog who polices other frogs? And other amphibians, I assume.”

“Which one’s funnier?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” he said. “I really don’t know. How could I ever choose?”

“It’s all right,” she said, snuggling into the corner of the sofa, her smile as bright as sunlight, and as warming. “Take your time. I’ve got all night.”

\--

In the morning, once James had reluctantly donned his funeral suit for the last time, they embarked on a shopping adventure, including a stop at Lily’s favorite café. James had switched from tea to coffee in university for the increased caffeine, but he now found that even the smell of roasted beans turned his stomach.

It seemed terribly normal to be out doing the shopping, and to be doing it with Lily felt…right. It did not feel as though they had been apart for most of their lives. Their conversation flowed seamlessly, revealing small truths that filled in the gap between then and now: Lily’s accidental partnership with Sirius (he’d happened to watch as she collided with a man moments after he died), James’s favorite hire (a kind, sickly man with a sharp wit and a knack for helping organize James’s thoughts), and their mutual elation when a favorite television show had been revived some years earlier.

They returned to The Pie Hole once James had acquired a new wardrobe—aided greatly by Lily’s eye for color—and other life necessities, including copious amounts of tea.

Bags in hand, they slid into a booth near the window. James took extra care not to bump his feet into Lily’s.

Within seconds, an unwanted figure dropped down at his side.

Sirius’s lip gave a faint curl at the sight of James’s new belongings, but he quickly turned his attention to Lily.

“Morning, gorgeous,” he said, giving a brief, upward nod. “We need to talk.”

James attempted not to bristle in his seat, but feared the choked noise in his throat rather gave him away.

“Yes, good afternoon to you, too, Sirius,” Lily said brightly. “I’m also sorry for yesterday, thanks for apologizing. And yes, you’re right, James had nothing to do with any of this, so deliberately riling him up is completely uncalled for.”

“Not the talk I was hoping for, actually,” Sirius said. “Was going for more of the one-on-one kind, the kind without Dead Guy here.”

“Potter,” James offered. “It’s two syllables. Three if you add my Christian name. Just throwing it out there.”

“Whatever you have to say to me,” Lily said, “you can say to James.”

Sirius’s lips pressed together. “You need to take a coupon for this conversation and redeem it at another time.”

“I’d like to redeem it now, please.”

“Check the fine print – it’s not valid in the presence of others. In the meantime, are we pursuing Dead Guy’s case? If not, I’ll find another.”

“Potter’s case,” James said. “ _My_ case. The one in which I was”—he looked around and switched to a whisper—“ _murdered_.”

“Needy bloke,” Sirius said to Lily, “isn’t he?”

“Sirius,” Lily warned. “Yes, we’re going to solve his case.”

Sirius turned to James. “If your company’s reward weren’t worth it, I might be tempted to leave it alone. As it is, though…start telling me all about those people you angered so much that they wanted to kill you.”

“Getting the sense,” James said, “that you can relate to those hypothetical individuals.”

Sirius flashed a grin. “Greatly.”

If Lily hadn’t made it clear that Sirius’s involvement would be critical, James would have shared a series of words with him, most of which ended with “off.” There was no alternative, though, so James proceeded to tell him all that he’d told Lily the night before. Which was to say, not much.

“That’s not much to go on,” Sirius said, “but fortunately for all of us, I’ve gone on less.”

“Which reminds me,” James said. “The reward money. We should split it thirty-thirty-forty. It’s only fair I get more – I did die for it.”

Sirius muttered something inaudible, but did, remarkably, nod. “Fine.”

James glanced at Lily, who said, “Of course.”

“Brilliant.” James dropped his palms onto the table. “Then let’s solve this case.”

With a distinct lack of empathy, Sirius questioned him about his flat, his friends, and his routine. The answers were, unfortunately, nothing had been amiss, his friends had all seemed normal, and he was, at least with his coffee, a creature of habit.

“I always add milk,” James said. “Anyone at work could’ve picked up on that in the break room.”

“The police didn’t find any unusual prints or DNA evidence anywhere in your flat,” Sirius said, “not even on your milk carton. That points to someone who’s used to this sort of activity, or someone close to you, someone who’s been to your place before.”

James frowned. “Must be the former, then, but that still seems like a stretch. It’s not like I pissed off a mob boss recently.”

“But you did a while ago?” Lily asked.

“What can I say,” James said, dropping to a lower register. “I live a roguish life. Meanest spreadsheet maker in town, I am. My formulas are as valuable as cocaine in some circles, and the mob wanted them, but I said I don’t play dirty. Can’t say I’m entirely surprised things played out this way. I’m just glad they did it quickly.”

He was rewarded by a wide, bright smile from Lily, one that he found himself copying immediately.

“That was less morbid than your earlier joke about dying,” she said.

“Oh good, I was hoping it’d come off that way.”

Sirius pinched the bridge of his nose. “It wasn’t a new carton of milk, right?”

James’s smile drooped. “No, I bought it a few days ago. That is, a few days before – a week ago now. Sorry, time’s all messed up for me on account of I was dead for a while.”

“More morbid that time,” Lily remarked.

“Noted. Got to work on finding that balance.”

“You’ve got time to sort it out.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sirius said. “Dead Guy. When had you last used the milk before it killed you?”

“Er, day before. In my coffee and in my cereal.”

“And what did you do between then and the next morning?”

James’s fingers tangled into his hair, his mind flitting back to what had been, apparently, the last day of his life.

“S’pose I was at work until about seven,” he said, “then I went home and walked Algernon. Capped off the night at the pub with some mates, and…yeah.”

That had been that. The end of James’s life.

He let his hand fall from his hair back to his lap, his cheeks heating. What an inauspicious last day to have had. Not the worst, but certainly not the best. If he’d been able to do it again, he certainly wouldn’t have stayed late to finish his presentation for an upcoming meeting, or wasted ten minutes flicking balls of paper into the mesh bin in his office.

Spending extra time scratching behind Algernon’s ears, though…that he did not regret one bit.

Sirius said, “You walk your cat?”

James nodded. “He gets tetchy when he hasn’t got his exercise.”

Sirius regarded him evenly, and moved on. “That gives us a definitive timeframe for the poisoning, at least. Everyone knew you’d be at work, but did you tell anyone you’d be walking your cat? Like your mates at the pub?”

“Er, I don’t remember mentioning it. But none of my friends killed me.”

“Suspect everyone.”

“That’s what they always say on television, but honestly. Am I even supposed to suspect my cat?”

“Anyone human,” Sirius amended.

“You’d reconsider,” Lily said, “if you met Algernon.”

Under other circumstances, James would have been elated to hear someone properly appreciate Algernon’s brilliance, but the circumstance of the moment was instead an awful truth dawning on James: Algernon had had to watch him die.

James wouldn’t have wished that on anyone, particularly not on someone who couldn’t perform CPR, or even operate a mobile phone.

He drew his eyes up to Sirius’s. “How long…how long did it take for someone to find me?”

His stomach churned at the thought of Algernon pawing at him, nudging him with his nose, and generally attempting everything he could to rouse James, all without success.

“The police were there in under an hour,” Sirius said. “Your cat wailed loud enough that the neighbors called the landlady downstairs. She’s the one who found you.”

His plant-loving landlady and Algernon didn’t deserve that horror. Nor, for that matter, did James. Whatever wrongs he’d committed in his lifetime, none of them warranted the early, horrible ending that had been forced upon him.

“Anything else you need to know?” James asked, his throat tight. He rather hoped the answer would be no. There were many layers to unpack about not staying dead, as it turned out, and if James had to pick an audience member to watch him attempt to sort things into emotional drawers, Sirius would be near the end of the list.

“Loads, but nothing more from you,” Sirius said. “We’ve got to talk to Snape. If you know him, Lily, then you should work the lead.”

Lily looked out the window. “The thing is, I don’t…. I told him I never wanted to see him again, and I’ve never liked all the baggage that goes with being a hypocrite. Doesn’t match my belongings.”

Sirius studied her face, and then, after a few moments, he nodded. “Right. I’ll go.” To James, he added, “When does Snape usually leave the office?”

“Best I can tell he lives in the lab,” James said, “but I’ve been assured he does actually leave about nine or ten. I’d be worried about his work-life balance if I thought he had anything else on the scale to begin with.”

“Antisocial. Threatening,” Sirius said, sliding out of the booth. “Yeah, he sounds like a suspect all right.”

Lily had not yet looked back from the window, her eyes unfocused, not even taking in the pedestrians on the pavement outside.

Sirius bade them both farewell with a curt, “Bye,” but only James managed a half-hearted wave at him.

When Sirius had gone, James turned his attention to Lily, taking in the clean lines of her profile. Perhaps the proper move would have been to inquire about what so deeply occupied her thoughts, but it clearly had to do with Snape, and James did not think he’d be able to muster any kind words about his potential murderer.

Instead he followed Lily’s suit, gazing out the window.

If he’d ever given it serious consideration, he probably could have speculated about how awful it would be to get murdered. Not just the physical pain—which had been great, in his case—but all the repercussions that shot out from the epicenter, knocking down those he cared most about.

He hadn’t truly sulked in years, but he gave himself permission to wallow in silence, here and now. He rather thought he’d deserved it.

Being murdered was the worst.

\--

That afternoon found Lily driving James through bucolic pastures to his aunt’s house. The sun gilded the lush trees and gardens around them, but James sat slumped in the back seat, staring numbly out the window.

Lily thought it was entirely natural that he’d feel a bit down – being murdered would send anyone into a dark spiral. It had taken a day to arrive, a delay she attributed to shock, but here it was, as expected as the postman on Mondays.

And now, at the exact moment when James was on a downturn, she had decided to bring him to a home to which he could never really return. It was, in some regards, a taunt. She lived in hope that any resulting trauma from the trip would be overshadowed by James’s relief that Algernon knew the truth.

Of course, she had yet to figure out how to communicate James’s alive again status to Algernon with Minerva around. Ideally Lily would get Algernon by himself, tell him the news, and send him out to the car for a visit, but she could hardly ask for a moment alone with a cat.

Even if she couldn’t get Algernon out the door, James might enjoy a last chance to soak in his old haunts, perhaps say a proper goodbye. Meanwhile, Lily could find out what his aunt had to say about potential suspects.

This task had the added benefit of keeping her mind focused. Every second she was thinking about James and his aunt and his cat, she was not thinking about It.

 _It_ , the topic so toxic it had come fully formed with mental capitals.

It was for another time, maybe never, but more likely soon enough.

But not yet.

James idly directed her to the narrow lane leading to his aunt’s property.

“Was it just the two of you out here?” she asked, carefully maneuvering her vehicle over the bumps and divots in the gravel.

“Yeah.” James smiled to himself, and Lily’s heart cheered that she’d chosen that moment to check the rearview mirror. “We’ve got neighbors not too far down the road. Sometimes they give her a lift into town if she needs it, but mostly I take care of the garden and the shopping.” He paused. “Or I did.”

A stone cottage came into view as they wended around a curve, a cozy island surrounded by neatly trimmed lawn. A vegetable garden dotted with diminutive spring plants lined one side of the lane, a string of flourishing rose bushes the other.

James sank down further to lie on the plush leather seat, hidden from the view of any stray passersby.

“James,” Lily said quietly. “If it’s too awful to be here, I’m more than happy to play lost tourist and turn around.”

“No, this is…all right. Although…could you maybe open the windows?”

Lily rolled them down, letting a warm breeze brush inside, and James sighed happily in the back.

She stepped out of the car, the crunch of her heels on gravel and the dust trail from her car the only disturbances to the idyllic calm of the country. She caught sight of a curtain swaying from one of the cottage windows, as though someone had just peeked out from behind it.

As Lily walked up the drive, the front door opened to reveal a straight-backed woman in slim emerald trousers and a matching eye patch. She was much less wizened than a hip injury and monocle would suggest, with only the beginning hints of crow’s feet near her eye and dark hair pinned into a tight bun. Her mouth was pressed into a stern line, her good eye wandering from Lily’s red heels up to her red dress and then her red hair, at which point her lips softened into a smile.

“Lily Evans,” she said.

Lily blinked. “Yes. I’m sorry, did you know I was coming?”

“You’re James’s friend from across the street,” Minerva said. “Of course I remember you. I’ve a bad hip, not a bad memory.”

“Apparently I need mine checked – I’m afraid I don’t remember meeting you.”

“We only met once,” Minerva said, “at James’s birthday party. But children have a way of disregarding the strange adults around them. I assure you, I don’t take it personally.”

A familiar ginger cat prowled out of the house, ears tucked back and eyes narrowed. He assessed Lily, in a way that reminded her very much of the once-over Minerva had given her, and took a pronounced sniff. He wandered over to circle around her legs, but distinctly did not rub up against her.

Lily breathed a tiny sigh of relief that his memory held up as well as Minerva’s. The trip out would have been pointless if it had started off with Algernon’s sudden demise.

Algernon, apparently contented, took a step backward and plopped down on the ground.

Minerva peered down at him. “I expected a better welcome from you.”

“He probably remembers I’m allergic,” Lily lied. “Just to touch, though.”

Algernon froze, his tail mid-swish. After only a half second of immobility, he bounded past Lily and over to the car.

That was one task done, then. All Lily had to do now was occupy Minerva while James got his visit in.

“Peculiar cat, that one,” Minerva said, stepping aside with a faint limp and gesturing for Lily to enter. “Much like his owner. May I offer you a cup of tea?”

Lily followed her into a small kitchen with a vase of fresh-cut flowers on the counter. Pots and pans hung in a tidy puzzle on a pegboard. While Lily examined a framed cross-stitch above the kitchen table—and failed to remember enough Latin to interpret the elegant words spelled out within it—Minerva went to fill a copper kettle at the sink.

She didn’t hobble, but the limp was just enough to be noticeable, her mouth twisting slightly as she walked. If Minerva hadn’t seemed the ardently self-sufficient type, Lily would have offered to make the tea herself.

“I hope it’s all right that I’ve stopped by like this,” Lily said, turning away from the cross-stitch. “Considering James and I haven’t—hadn’t—well.”

“If I minded, I would’ve had Algernon chase you back to the property line.”

“My shoes and weak ankles thank you for not inflicting that on me.”

Minerva set the kettle on the stove, turned on the gas, and picked up a book of matches.

“He was always very fond of you,” she said. “Spoke of you constantly, at least during the first few years.”

“Oh,” said Lily, her cheeks warming.

She, of course, had thought about James daily at Hogwarts, but she’d also had to sort through the guilt and horror of what she’d done to their parents. James had been under no such obligations. That he’d had not only thought of her, but spoken of her frequently, and without any reason to do so other than fondness….

She found she could not look at Minerva.

“It’s funny,” she told the table. “I don’t remember any of my other childhood friends nearly as well as I remember James.”

Minerva walked with her slightly halting gait over to the table and gripped the back of a chair. “Some people,” she said with the merest hint of a smile, “etch themselves on your memory.”

Etch sounded far too weak a word for what Lily felt. James was a bright beacon in her recollections, even through the haze that had set in after her father’s death.

When she’d first learned about James’s murder, Lily had dropped onto the sofa in her flat, eyes flooded with hot tears. She hadn’t even seen him for the better part of two decades at the time. Minerva, on the other hand, had lost her brother, sister-in-law, and now adopted son....

Lily’s thoughts wandered back to It, but Lily wrangled them away.

Instead, she said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“And I, yours.”

Lily’s insides twisted. Among other things, she had not considered how difficult it would be to lie to James’s pseudo parent, to pretend that James would not come running if only she’d call.

“I came to offer condolences,” Lily made herself say, “but also to ask for your help. I work with a private investigator these days, and I’m determined to help solve James’s murder.”

Minerva’s head tilted. “James always wanted to be a policeman, you know.”

“Did he?” Lily asked innocently.

Minerva considered her for a moment, and Lily had the distinct impression of being thoroughly—and accurately—scrutinized.

“How well matched you two were,” Minerva said.

The kettle whistle burst into action, an outsized noise for such a small room.

As Minerva made her way back to the stove, she added, “I don’t mind you asking questions, no. You were sharp, if I recall. It would put my mind at ease to know someone competent was on the case.”

“I appreciate it. I know this might be...difficult.” Lily forced herself not to fidget. “D’you have any thoughts on who might’ve wanted to kill him?”

“I spoke with the police, but I’ve seen goldfish process information quicker.” Minerva gave a small harrumph. “Something to do with his job seems most likely. James has always been quick to make friends, and good, loyal ones at that.”

“He didn’t—oh, steal someone’s girlfriend or something.”

Minerva, midway through pouring water into a gold-rimmed teacup, paused to give Lily a look.

“Just an example,” Lily added quickly.

Minerva resumed her steady, measured pouring. “Nothing that he told me of.”

“Would he have? If he had done, that is.”

“When he was younger, James attempted to keep many things from me.” Minerva picked up the cups and turned to Lily. “Attempted being the operative word.”

“And when he was older?”

“He did fewer things that merited hiding, and often solicited my advice on the ones he couldn’t seem to avoid.”

“So he gained some sense, you mean.”

“Some, indeed. He was still James.”

Lily accepted the cup of tea and smiled, but quickly hid it when she caught sight of the strained brackets framing Minerva’s mouth. Up close, Lily could spot the lace-edged handkerchief in Minerva’s blouse pocket, still damp in places, and the red puffiness around her eye.

Perhaps Lily had been premature in barring James from seeing his aunt. The woman lived alone in the countryside. She had every reason to protect James, and by extension Lily. If Minerva did share Lily’s abilities with anyone, she’d lose James again when the government kidnapped him for experimentation, or whatever other horrific outcome might ensue.

But if Lily were going to change course, now was not the time.

“So no suspects come to mind?” Lily asked.

Minerva lowered herself into a chair. “I’m afraid not. Would that I were of more assistance on this, but if James feared for his life—unlikely, in my mind—he didn’t approach me about it. Which, as I said, makes me all the more certain that he didn’t see this coming.” For a moment, Minerva appeared closer to the age that Lily had expected, worn and frail, but only for a moment, and no longer. “Do you have any suspects?”

“One,” Lily said. “I’m afraid I can’t say more, other than that my associate is working that lead as we speak.”

“As far as I can tell, the police’s prime suspect might as well be James’s ficus plant.”

“Do you know, Ms. McGonagall—”

“Minerva.”

“Minerva.” Lily wrapped her fingers around her cup. “I’m getting the sense that you’re trying to communicate something about your opinion of the police.”

“And already you’ve proved yourself more adept than the nitwit assigned to James’s case.”

Lily’s mouth curled into a smile.

Together they drank perfectly produced tea and consumed ginger biscuits the size of Lily’s palm, while birds chirped outside the open kitchen window. Minerva recounted several excellent stories about James post-Lily, including one about him starting a betting pool over how long he could ride a sheep before it bucked him off.

“Thoroughly rigged, of course,” Minerva said. “Only he’d been misinformed about the drug’s effect on sheep, and the poor animal went wild. Broke his arm that day.” Her smile was small and tight, and it did not last long. “Foolish boy.”

Lily, in turn, detailed her adventures with James in the woods and in neighbors’ gardens, stories with invisible swords and dragons to slay. It seemed a fair repayment for Minerva’s time, tea, and tales.

Minerva bore the rehashing of James’s life well, with only a slight sheen to her eye at times, or her fingers going white as they pressed against her teacup. Each signal of grief sent Lily’s stomach lower into her abdomen.

Once their cups sat empty and their plates held only crumbs, Minerva pushed herself out of her seat and beckoned for Lily to follow.

“Thought you might like to see something,” she said.

Slowly, haltingly, she led Lily down a corridor bathed in sunlight. Lily matched her pace, taking the opportunity to admire the framed needlepoints and pictures of James that hung on the walls. James’s mum featured in several of the photos, which only tightened the knots of guilt.

There was so much to tell James.

He wouldn’t like any of it. Especially not It.

At the end of the corridor, Minerva opened the door to a room cast in faint blue, the sun battling against closed curtains and winning. Yellowing posters of football teams covered the walls, matched by a shelf of golden football trophies above a crowded desk. The room still smelled entirely of James, like musty cat and grassy cleats, with a hint of acrid smoke.

What struck Lily most, however, was the fact that the sheets lay in a tangled heap, the pillow hanging halfway off the bed. It looked as though he’d only left that morning, as though his bed were patiently waiting for its owner to return.

“I never imagined what I’d do with his room,” Minerva said, one hand still clutched around the doorknob. “I worried more about keeping my room tidy for him.”

Lily considered various platitudes, idioms, and maxims to express condolences, but in the end she said nothing. Her apologies meant very little, considering she could undo the harm of James’s passing in an instant.

“Where was I,” Minerva said, loosening her grip on the door. “Yes, over here.”

She carefully made her way across the floor, managing to avoid the few socks and other detritus on the rug, and pulled something out of a pile on top of James’s desk.

“Here,” she said, holding it out to Lily.

Lily crossed to her, her journey over the floor much quicker and easier than Minerva’s. Up close, she could see that Minerva held a small wooden frame, with a mess of untidy cross-stitches on a stretched white cloth.

“Er,” Lily said.

“Seems only right you should have it.” Minerva proffered it forward again. “It’s you.”

Lily grasped the frame with her fingertips. She tilted it sideways and then back again, eyes scanning over the chaotic mess of forest green and mud colored exes, before settling on a streak of red above two misshapen bundles of emerald.

Her heart ached.

“James knows how to cross-stitch?” she said, because she was due to say something.

“No, he’s rubbish. I tried to make him take it up when he first came—it kept his hands busy—but football was more effective at wearing him out.”

If James had created a cross-stitch after the departure of a childhood friend, then Lily couldn’t imagine what sort of art he might produce now about losing his surrogate mother.

Lily opened her mouth to say something—exactly what, she wasn’t sure, perhaps something along the lines of _James is in the car_ —but she stopped when Algernon slipped into the room.

Any other cat, Lily might have wondered how they’d got inside, but this was Algernon. He marched up to Lily and meowed decisively.

Although she could not have explained how she knew that this was so, she said, “I think he’s telling me to go.”

“He’s always been odd,” Minerva said, “but not usually this rude. At least, not with anyone but James.”

Lily cleared her throat, which had gone dry. “I should go anyway,” she said, leaving off, _before I tell you the truth._ “I’ve things to do. Pies to bake.”

“Murders to solve.”

“Ficuses to interrogate.” Lily moved for the door. “Thank you so much for your hospitality. And for the cross-stitch. I—I might stop by again sometime. If you don’t mind.”

If Minerva had picked up on Lily’s anxiety, she did not visibly show it.

“You’re always welcome here,” she said, “regardless of how the investigation turns out.”

“I—thank you. I’ll see myself out.”

Lily avoided looking at the photographs of James as she sped down the corridor, tucking the cross-stitch into her purse.

She’d very nearly given herself away. She might yet tell Minerva, but it couldn’t be straight away, couldn’t be unplanned. She needed time to think.

She didn’t stop hurrying until she reached the car, pausing once she’d opened the door to check for James in the back seat.

He lay with his eyes closed, a faint smile on his lips, his hands tucked behind his head. His chest swelled and sank with each slow breath he took, and she found herself adopting his rhythm, her heartbeat giving up on its frenzied pace.

She slid into the car.

“It’s the smell,” James sighed. “I never realized how soothing it was, but there’s something about the gardens here.”

Lily inhaled deeply as she started the car. It smelled like nothing more than the country to her, but then again, home always had a distinctive scent to its occupants.

“Your aunt’s holding up all right,” she said, instead of the myriad thoughts tumbling around in her mind. “I mean, she’s clearly upset, don’t get me wrong, but she seems…like she’s managing. She had clothes on and food in the kitchen, anyway, which is a good sign.”

James had no response to that. Lily peered at the rearview mirror, but her seat blocked James’s face. All she managed to make out was his hands, now clenched into fists on top of his stomach.

Minerva was not the only one wounded by the ruse Lily had forced upon them.

“How did she hurt her hip?” Lily asked with false cheer. “She doesn’t strike me as the _fell down the stairs_ sort.”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

Lily twisted sideways to look back at him. “What, really? Actually, never mind, that makes perfect sense.”

“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “She’s great.”

“I assume it’s the same story for her eye patch.”

“Oh, no, that was a kitty litter accident. She doesn’t like to talk about that.”

He offered nothing further as they began heading down the drive, rocks pattering against the underside of her car. He’d been almost better when she’d returned, and now she appeared to have ruined it again.

“At least Algernon must’ve showered you with affection,” she said. “Did he forgive you for not coming to find him as soon as I brought you back?”

As they turned onto the main road, James hauled himself up in the seat, looping his arms around the front passenger headrest.

“He scratched me something awful,” James said, although he sounded almost pleased about it, holding up a hand to inspect it. “D’you have some good antiseptic at home?”

“Mm, in the bathroom cupboard.” She glanced sideways. “He didn’t cover your hands in dirt, though – care to explain how that happened?”

“Digging my way out of my own grave.”

“Little too close to morbid that time.”

“Noted.”

“The truth?”

“I pulled some weeds in the garden with Algernon’s help.”

Lily spared him a look, but rather undercut it with the smile she couldn’t seem to suppress. Some sense, indeed.

“You didn’t honestly expect me to stay in the car,” he said.

“I do know you better than that, but I hoped you wouldn’t be so thick as to leave a trace.”

James shrugged. “What’s she going to do, accuse my ghost of doing it? Ghost me would be too busy hunting down my murderer, and she knows it, so she’ll think the neighbors did it.”

Lily tried to hide her enduring smile by facing directly forward, lest she encourage him. He was, in so many ways, the same reckless boy she’d known, and loved, so long ago. The same boy she thought she could love now, even without fully knowing him as an adult.

After a few minutes of silence, grassy pastures flying by them on either side, James retracted his hands to his lap.

“Do you think,” he began, and then stopped. “I mean. D’you think we could come back sometime? Just so I can sit in the car.”

She might not have learned all the nooks and crannies of his adult self, but she knew enough to read the child-like desperation beneath his question.

“By sit in the car you mean secretly weed the garden?” she asked.

“Who says I want to weed next time?”

“Yes,” she said, in part because she did think Minerva could be trusted with James’s existence, and in part to catch the dazzling smile on James’s face at her response. “We can definitely come back.”

\--

When they’d returned to The Pie Hole, James claimed he needed to clear his thoughts with a walk. The intentionally innocent look on his face said that he had something more in mind, but Lily waved him off and checked in with Albus on the day’s operations. Just as she got the report on the top-selling pies of the day, the bell over the door went off in a frenzy, signifying the entrance of one particular person who was on a campaign to eliminate the bell by overusing it as much as possible.

Lily had not yet been swayed.

Sirius caught her eye, nodded upward, and dropped gracefully into a booth far away from the other patrons. Lily had never been one to blindly follow Sirius’s directives, though, and finished her conversation with Albus before sliding into the booth.

“No pie?” Sirius asked, one arm stretched out on top of the seat.

“Pie is reserved for people who aren’t being massive twats.”

“What about as consolation for someone who’s just unsuccessfully interviewed a pie shop owner’s boyfriend’s potential murderer?”

“Maybe if this hypothetical person would stop aggravating said pie shop owner’s boyfriend, there could be pie.”

“So he is your boyfriend, then?”

“If I recall, your office is in Chinatown, which means we are nowhere near your business.”

He grinned. “Sensitive topic.”

“If you really want to get into it, I’m happy to ask you loads of probing, pointed questions about your brother in return.”

Sirius looked away, affecting disinterest. “Like I care if he’s your boyfriend anyway.”

Lily had known Sirius for more than five years, and could guess precisely how much Sirius did care about the sudden appearance of another close person in Lily’s life. Neither of them had anything like a wide circle of friends.

“So you failed, then?” she said. “Can’t help but feel that your lack of success is related to James being James and not Severus’s unwillingness to fess up.”

“I’m deeply and personally offended that you think I’d intentionally sabotage my own investigation.”

Lily’s eyebrows inched upward.

“Yeah, all right,” he conceded, “I thought about it, but that company reward is out there waiting for us. Besides, I knew you’d cut off my cock with your pastry cutter, and I thought long and hard about how painful an ending that would be for me.”

“Good,” she said. “Because it wouldn’t just be your cock – it’d be your balls, too. I believe in thoroughness.”

“Could we negotiate it down to one ball? Hypothetically.”

“What do you want with one ball?”

“Dunno. Just curious how far into this hypothetical you’d be willing to go.”

“Well, rest assured, I’d take both.”

“I have to respect your dedication. It makes you a better P.I.”

Lily smothered her grin. “Are we finished with the hypotheticals, then? If so, tell me what happened with Severus.”

Sirius cast a longing look toward the tower of pies behind the counter, and then another meaningful one at Lily, but she gave the barest shake of her head.

He scowled, and said, “Snape refused to speak with me at all. Funny enough, he’s got no interest in helping solve this case. It’s all right, though, I’ll try to dig up some dirt on him, see if we can’t persuade him into talking.”

Lily squeezed her eyes shut for a brief moment, listening to the idle chatter of the few remaining customers and the clinking of silverware on plates.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Ready to endure the hypocrisy?”

“I’ll tolerate the awkwardness if it gets us some answers.”

Sirius grimaced, although being Sirius, he still looked rather handsome. “Oh, god, don’t tell me you dated Snape. He looks like a rotting banana.”

“If that’s what you told him,” she said in a crisp voice, “then no wonder he didn’t want to speak to you.”

“So you did date him.”

“We’re still nowhere near Chinatown, but no, you overly involved prat, we were only mates.”

Sirius sank back in the booth, the vinyl squeaking as he shifted. “All the same, can’t say I blame you for not wanting to lay eyes on him again. At least a real rotting banana you can turn into bread.”

“See, that’s exactly the sort of reason there’s no pie for you today. You’ll get nowhere insulting my friends.”

“Snape’s not your friend anymore, and I’m not your pet. You can’t train me into good behavior with pie.”

“No, but the pie leverage does let me be a little vindictive, and I’m not above the small pleasures in life. Taunting, cutting remarks, the smell of grass after it rains.”

“I don’t remember that verse of My Favorite Things.”

“You must’ve missed it – it’s an Easter egg on the DVD.”

Sirius sat up taller, a smug half-smile sliding into place. “Speaking of extras, redeem your coupon.”

She waved a hand for him to continue.

He glanced around, and asked in a low voice, “Don’t you want to know who you killed yesterday?”

The topic she’d been mentally on the run from now tackled the center of her attention, sending a swift punch to her gut.

She’d killed someone yesterday.

She’d _killed_ someone. She’d been fickle with her finger and firm with her choices and someone had paid the price.

The sixty-second rule had applied in the past—a lesson she could not have learned in a more impactful way—yet she’d hoped, somehow, that it had made an exception for her just this once. But the universe’s restriction had held: keep someone alive one second too long, and someone else had to die.

She sank her head into her hands, her palms covering her eyes.

“Who was it?” she asked.

“Mundungus Fletcher,” Sirius said. “He worked in the funeral home. Kicked it while sitting on the toilet, poor bugger. They ruled it death by natural causes.”

The universe, for inexplicable reasons, had given Lily the power to choose who lived and who stayed dead. She’d never wielded it intentionally before, never tried to violate the sixty-second rule. She could have abused her powers in so many ways over the years. She could have done irreparable damage to countless lives.

But she hadn’t. Because she couldn’t.

But now she had.

“Is it too much to hope that he was a terrible person?” she asked. “That I accidentally killed a murderer or a pedophile or something?”

“When they went through his flat, they found all sorts of stolen items from dead people. Does that make you feel better?”

“I don’t know that I want to feel better,” she said, hyperaware of each inch of her treacherous body, her skin that insistently raised the dead and would not stop. “I don’t want to be the sort of person who’s okay with doing something like this.”

She hadn’t felt this way since she’d unwittingly killed James’s mum. Her dad had collapsed in the kitchen, Lily had rushed over and grabbed him, and suddenly he’d been fine. One minute later, James’s mum had dropped dead across the street.

Six hours later, her dad had kissed her goodnight.

Guilt had clung to her insides for years, black and hot and sticky, reminding her at every turn of what she’d done. Being sent to Hogwarts had, in some way, been a blessing. She hadn’t had to face James, or endure being his friend while she sorted through her burden. Eventually she’d managed to clear the guilt away, managed to get on with her life, but it oozed back in now, as easily as if had never left, as though it remembered the shape of her insides as well as she remembered its.

The first time she’d killed someone, she’d had the excuse of ignorance. This time she’d made a choice.

She lifted her head. “I can’t work cases anymore. I’ve got no self-control.”

“Please,” Sirius said. “You’re not going to do this again.”

“I didn’t think I was the sort of person who did this, but I did. I killed someone and there’s no reason to think I won’t do it again.”

“Clearly this was a one-off. You kept Dead Guy alive because—all right, we’re not in Chinatown, but nobody kills over someone they haven’t seen in twenty years unless…well.”

“I know, I wasn’t thinking—”

“Who else would you be so irrational over?”

Petunia would kill herself if Lily brought her back from the dead. Sirius, too, had made his preferences clear, as had Albus one day when he’d talked about death as the next great adventure.

“No one,” she said. “There’s no one else who’d want to come back.”

“Like I said. You won’t do it again.”

She would not do it again. But that did nothing to chip away at the guilt, or loosen the knots in her chest.

“I still did it once,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “You did.”

She was a killer. She’d always wondered how murderers went on with their lives, how they bought groceries and hugged family and generally pretended nothing had ever happened. But now that was her, and she had gone on. Or she had so far. It seemed impossible to live like this, knowing this, regretting this—

Only there was one thing. One key difference from last time, when two had ended up dead.

This time she’d saved James.

She’d traded Fletcher’s life for James’s, and on some level she could not regret that choice. It was horrible that saving James had cost Fletcher his life. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

But that was what had happened. That was what she’d done. She’d brought back into the world James staring fondly at his cat’s scratches, brought back his crooked grin and messy hair and absurd thoughts. She’d resurrected a man who had not deserved his death, hadn’t even reached thirty before his life had been snatched away from him.

She’d only corrected the universe’s error.

The last time she’d made a trade, she’d spent years scraping away the guilt. This time, though…this time it might come off easier.

“Thanks,” she said.

Sirius shrugged, clearly intending it to come off as insouciant, but falling well short of it.

“I need my partner,” he said. “Anything for my business.”

“Of course.”

“Feel guilty, or don’t. I don’t care so long as you keep working my cases.”

“Naturally.”

A smile hovered near her lips, close to seeing the light of day, but it ultimately lost the fight.

She may have begun to work through things, but the issue of telling James remained. Because she would have to tell him, eventually. Only telling him would unload some of the guilt onto his shoulders, and that guilt was by rights entirely hers. He shouldn’t have to burden himself with it.

James would want to know, though. And if she intended to tell him, sooner was better than later.

That dread kept her from smiling, as did another remaining order of business.

“For the record,” Lily said, “you know I wasn’t thinking about you when I did it, it’s a random proximity thing—”

“ _I_ was in fucking proximity.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I would have been devastated if I’d accidentally killed you.”

Sirius continued to look affronted for a moment, but then he relented.

“I know,” he said. “I am worthy of some intense weeping. Possibly even a guilt-ridden suicide.”

“Is that a hint of forgiveness I detect?”

“Half a hint, maybe. Wouldn’t stretch it to a whole hint.”

Lily’s mouth did settle into a weak smile, then. This was one small triumph for the day, but that was more than she felt properly entitled to.

“You’re just happy you’ll have this hanging over my head for the rest of my life,” she said, “and can use it to extract untold favors.”

Sirius sat back, fingers steepling, his lips matching the curve of Lily’s smile. “What can I say,” he said. “There’s a reason that we’re such good partners.”

\--

The behemoth buildings of Potter & Potter Production occupied the better part of a city block, the walls sheer faces of glinting windows stretching up from the street. Rose and orange sunset reflected like a crown at the top of the tallest tower, while car headlights flashed around the base.

Lily heaved open the glass front door to enter a gleaming white lobby.

It might have helped to ask James how to find Severus inside, but he hadn’t returned by the time she needed to head into the city proper. Luckily, external assistance was not a prerequisite for a part-time P.I. A few kind words and an apologetic smile was all it took to get the security guard at reception to pick up his phone. He’d barely finished saying her name into the receiver when a familiar voice ordered the guard to send her up.

The guard gave her a look that clearly wondered why she was there to see, of all people, Severus Snape.

Lily, being a mature adult who did not want to be tossed out of the building, merely replied, “Thank you,” and headed for the bank of elevators.

She had twenty-three floors to compose herself, to try to convince her speeding heart and sweaty hands that there was no reason to be anxious. But with every floor the elevator passed, her stomach sank ever lower.

At the elevator ding announcing her arrival, Lily inhaled deeply and squared her shoulders.

The doors opened to reveal Severus waiting for her, his arms folded and his foot tapping. He’d always looked cross, whether or not he felt that way, but his usual lines faded away when he caught sight of her.

“Lily,” he said, as though he could scarcely believe it, his eyes roving over her.

“Severus,” she said evenly, stepping out of the elevator. Her hands found safety in her trench coat pockets.

“I—I missed you.”

She had missed him in turn, but not in the easy, uncomplicated way that he had no doubt missed her.

The better part of a decade had passed since she’d last seen him. Time had done little to soften the sharp planes of his face, and a life in the lab hadn’t helped the pallor of his skin. Still, he was Severus, and by all appearances he was precisely where he’d always longed to be. His crisp lab coat bore a grass-colored stain over his left hip, but was otherwise a vast improvement over the threadbare uniforms he’d worn at Hogwarts; an improvement he no doubt cherished deeply.

“Can we talk somewhere in private?” she asked.

“This way,” he said, and led her to a conference room with dark leather seats around a dark wooden table, never once taking his eyes off her.

Lily gravitated toward the windows, taking in the urban constellations of lit office windows across the skyline. The only noises in the room were the gentle hum of the air system and the pounding of Lily’s heart, which seemed to be operating at twice its usual volume.

Severus hovered near her, lingering slightly too close.

She could play innocent at first, pretend she were only there to catch up, but knowing Severus, he wouldn’t take kindly to the deception. Hypocritical of him, but true nonetheless. Trying to soften him up by asking how he’d been would only falsely lead him to believe there was some hope of reconciliation.

She turned to face him. “I’m here investigating James Potter’s murder.”

Severus’s lip curled, his body recoiling faintly, like a matchstick flame bending in a breeze. “ _Potter_? What do you care about him?”

“We were best mates before I got sent to Hogwarts.”

“How unfortunate for you.”

She kept her exasperated look locked away. “I’m asking for help because we were friends once.”

“So keen to rekindle our acquaintance once you need something.”

“It’s a favor. You don’t have to help. But I’m asking.” She hesitated, nearly withholding the truth. “I’d do the same if it had been you.”

Severus appeared to war with himself, his features tense and his head ducked.

Some part of her had feared that they’d fall back into an easy camaraderie tonight, that she’d have to reckon with her past decision, but the low, constant simmering in her stomach proved otherwise. There’d be no renewed friendship tonight. There might not have even been a point to inflicting this on herself if he still wouldn’t speak up.

She was on the verge of taking her leave when Severus spat, “I didn’t kill him.”

“I know,” she said, a statement which was very nearly the truth, but failed to cross the line into complete veracity.

Severus scowled.

She’d spent the drive over wracking her brain for ways to persuade Severus to talk about the case: bribery, blackmail, and begging were all options, but none of them were liable to work on Severus.

In the end, the best strategy she’d devised was a simple: “Please.”

Severus looked away at once, silent for another moment.

“Five minutes,” he at last said to the window. “I’m willing to speak about this for five minutes.”

“Thank you,” she said, removing her notebook from her inner coat pocket.

He lifted his chin, barely glancing at her pen. “I suppose you’ll want to know my alibi. One assumes the poison was brought into his flat, hm, no more than a day in advance. On the day in question, I arrived here and stayed late. The cameras and the security badge system will support this, and provide the detail on the exact time of my arrival and departure. I took the tube home—my Oyster card will demonstrate this—and my flatmates can verify that I went to bed at my usual time. I could have snuck out during the night, but even Potter, thick-headed as he was, should have noticed someone breaking into his flat while he was home.”

Lily did not tell him that a work badge or an Oyster card hardly counted as sufficient evidence – anyone could use those on his behalf to simulate movement. Camera footage, preferably not the company’s, would be the only true marker of innocence.

But it was, if nothing else, the beginnings of a solid alibi, one that she could have Sirius investigate later.

“I’ll double-check all that to be sure,” she said, “standard protocol…but thanks.”

He spared her a look. “Is that all?”

Lily ignored the cheeky retort that her mind had provided – she couldn’t alienate him now that he was finally responding – and tapped a line in her notebook.

“You threatened James over a project,” she said. “You told him if he cut it, you’d make him regret it.”

“According to whom?”

“A trustworthy source.”

Severus regarded her, facing her more fully. “You said you didn’t think I did it.”

“That doesn’t mean you didn’t threaten him. I do know you, Severus.”

His eyes narrowed to dark slits. “Then surely you know I’m not fool enough to threaten someone I fully intend to murder at a later date.”

“I do, which is why I’m willing to believe your side of the story. But you did threaten him – why?”

“Because the project merits investigation,” he said in a clipped voice.

With difficulty, she swallowed the cutting remark she’d planned next.

“What was the project, exactly?” she asked.

“What does it matter?”

“ _Severus_.”

He pressed his lips together. “You shouldn’t be investigating murders at all. You’ll be found out.”

“I’m careful,” she snapped. “You were saying—”

“You help people who’d do nothing to help you, were your positions reversed.”

“Just because you wanted me to do all sorts of selfish things doesn’t mean everyone would—”

“ _Selfish—_ they were for _science_ —”

“Science for your personal gain!” Lily caught her voice just as it rose too high, and forced it down. “I’d rather not waste my five minutes on your opinions about my life. Tell me about the project.”

Severus looked as though he were prepared to go another round, but then he clenched his jaw.

“Cryonics,” he bit out. “Is that sufficient?”

“Yes. Thank you.” She jabbed her pen down, nearly tearing through paper as she wrote. “Why was the project so important? Why was it worth threatening James?”

“It’ll help people,” he said through a terrible smile.

“You can’t possibly care personally about cryonics. So you care on behalf of someone else. Who?”

“Willing to believe the worst in me, as always.”

“Only because you proved yourself—” She halted, but her anger would not be stymied, and brought her a furious realization that gave clarity to Severus’s story. “Still hanging around with Riddle’s crowd, then?” she asked with a withering look.

“No,” Severus lied.

All these years and he still hadn’t changed one bit, or at least not for the better. No doubt he had the same manipulative, xenophobic circle of friends, to use the word ‘friend’ lightly.

Any attempt she made to blockade her hurt and her fury failed.

“I saw his campaign flyers around town last week,” she said. “He’s still a snake in a suit, by the sound of it. How is he supposed to run the city and his business at the same time, anyway? Don’t tell me, you’re also working on cloning him.”

Severus’s expression shuttered. He’d always been terrible at lying to her.

“If I were so important to him,” he said, “wouldn’t I work for his company?”

“No. He’d station you elsewhere to report back to him on the competition.”

“Oh, did your trustworthy source accuse me of corporate espionage as well?”

“I’m a part-time P.I. I can make my own bloody deductions.”

He took a neat step toward her, lowering his voice. “I’m far from incompetent, Lily. I know what it means that you know about my threat. Potter might’ve given you my name, but it would have been pure speculation.”

Severus’s remark had the unintended effect of dousing Lily’s anger with ice water. As much as she’d like to rage and row with him over any number of things, she could not afford to antagonize him. Particularly not now, when James’s life depended on Severus keeping Lily’s secrets.

“You’ve taken enough of my time,” Severus said, spinning away from her. “You have my alibi, or the best I can provide.”

She mentally cursed – she’d squandered her chance to learn more, been unable to restrain herself in time. This was entirely her fault. Severus had every reason and right to walk away.

If it hadn’t been James’s case at stake, she wouldn’t have said, “One more question.”

To her relief, Severus paused, but did not look back.

“Is the cryonics project back on?” she asked.

“No,” he said, savoring the word. “It’s been put on hold for us to pursue another project.”

The follow-up question _then what was the point of the threat_ sat unspoken in Lily’s throat.

Instead, she opened her mouth to force herself to thank him, but it didn’t matter. He strode out of the room without so much as a goodbye, leaving Lily to mull over this bizarre turn of events.

The visit had been worth the awkwardness – she’d got her answers. If only they made any sense.

\--

Lily spent a few minutes in the conference room jotting down notes, sifting through her myriad thoughts and contradictory emotions, before she realized the opportunity Severus had left for her.

She was at Potter & Potter, and she was unattended.

She stole out into the corridor, where she surreptitiously attempted to open every door she could find. Unfortunately, they all required a security badge to enter. She could have tried to nab one off a guard—men liked random hugs from gorgeous women, and never noticed when she stole their badges off them—but the labs weren’t likely to provide much more information without a computer login. There was also the risk of walking in on Severus, which would undoubtedly get her thrown out of the building entirely.

She’d just turned into the bank of elevators to try another floor when she ran headlong into a short blond man.

She cursed. He cried out, hands flinging up in shock, tossing the papers they held into the air. Documents fluttered down around them, flapping until they settled on the ground.

Lily dropped to her knees to start picking them up. “I’m so sorry.”

The man clutched a hand to his chest, his blue eyes watering. “Me too. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

Lily peeked at the papers as she shuffled them together, then handed them over.

“Say, er,” the man said, his face slowly coloring. “You don’t—I mean—I don’t…d’you have a badge?”

“Caught me,” Lily said, smiling and holding up her hands, the very picture of innocence. “I was here visiting one of the researchers.”

“Oh. I didn’t think anyone but Snape was still around.”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

The man stared at her blankly as he tucked the papers under his arm. “Him?”

“We’re old friends,” she added. “Went to school together.”

“Er, right.”

This man had proven he wasn’t about to give her a solid boot out the door, and he definitely seemed pliable. If possible, she did have one more errand she’d like to run in the building.

The rush of a new investigative opportunity washed away the sour taste in her mouth from her earlier encounter.

“I hope this isn’t intrusive,” she said, putting on her most charming smile with a hint of apology, “but did you know James Potter?”

“Er, yeah, I do.” The man’s gaze dropped to the floor. “Did.”

“Thing is,” Lily said, leaning in conspiratorially, “I’m investigating his murder. So d’you think I could sneak a look at his office? Just to get a sense of the bloke, help me understand what he might’ve been thinking before he got offed.”

The man looked over his shoulder to the elevators. “I’m supposed to escort you to the desk—”

Lily stuck out her hand. “I’m Kitty Pimms, private investigator.”

He shook her hand, still looking a bit lost. “Peter Pettigrew.”

“Peter. Good strong name. Now, Peter, don’t you want me to solve the murder? To bring justice to your coworker?”

“I—that is—of course, but you—er….”

“Please,” she said, maintaining her grip on his hand. “I’m new to the job, and if I don’t do well on this one, I think they’re going to fire me, and I’d be all right with that, only my sister and her toddler have just moved in with me, and she can’t get a job because of the pregnancy gone wrong—”

“All right, all right,” Peter said hastily, stealing back his hand and readjusting his grip on his papers. “Just a quick look, though. For James.”

Peter reluctantly escorted her to a higher floor, during which time Lily learned that he was one of James’s subordinates.

“How was he as a manager?” she asked in the elevator.

“Decent. Nice.” Peter swallowed. “He really looked out for us, you know? More than any other manager I’ve ever had. He wanted us to do well.”

“Doesn’t sound like the type someone would murder.”

“N-no. He didn’t deserve that. But….”

“But?”

Peter merely shook his head, leading her past a string of dark cubes to a corner office. He fished a key out of his pocket and opened the door.

“Don’t suppose I can get a moment alone?” Lily asked.

“Er—no, I think I’d better not. I’ll already be in loads of trouble if anyone finds out I let you up here.”

Lily placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “I appreciate you taking such a risk for me, I really do. I’ll be quick.”

She stepped inside and wandered over to a pair of stiff leather armchairs flanking a glass coffee table. They didn’t match her vision of James’s style, but then again, some companies didn’t give employees a say in furniture choices. The football magazine tucked among the business journals on the table seemed much more appropriate.

“No one’s come for his things already, have they?” Lily called toward the door.

“Not yet,” Peter said. “No one’s supposed to remove much until the police say so.”

She briefly held her hands aloft to show she wasn’t touching anything, and continued over to the desk. Papers lay strewn over every inch of it, not unlike James’s desk at Minerva’s, but without the accompanying scent of Algernon. The desk only held paper, though. No knick-knacks, no personal photos. Not in the entire office. Besides the football magazine, the only other sign of the office’s occupant was a calendar hanging on the wall, which showed a field very similar to those surrounding Minerva’s home.

“Finished?” Peter asked, poking his head in the door and looking nervous.

“Yeah,” Lily said, glancing around once more. “I think I’ve got what I need.”

\--

James awoke the same way he’d fallen asleep: facing an empty twin bed across the room.

If nearly anyone else in his life had come home after James had fallen asleep, he might have worried. If it had been Peter, for instance, James would have skipped sleep altogether and printed up missing persons flyers. Lily, on the other hand, had probably just been on a terrific stakeout as part of her terrific P.I. job.

His lack of worry was reaffirmed by a note in the kitchen inviting him to join her at The Pie Hole if he felt like it, which was a foolish conditional sentence. He was not about to forego an excuse to start eating pie for breakfast.

Showered, dried, and dressed in his new clothes, James strolled down to the front entrance of The Pie Hole only to find it locked. Albus spotted him at once and came to let him in, the bell jangling overhead.

“It appears,” Albus said, “that Lily neglected to mention we keep the back door open at this time of day.”

“We’re closed? No one else wants pie for breakfast?”

“The demand exists. The patrons have spoken. Lily’s lack of fondness for alarm clocks, however, has them thwarted,” Albus said, locking the door behind James. “Coffee?”

James blanched. “Tea, please. As strong as you can make it.”

While Albus wandered off to a far corner of the dining area, James headed toward the kitchen. He stopped in the doorway, shoulder propped against the wall and hands in his pockets, content to watch Lily in her element. She stood at her marble-top island like a captain at the helm, her hands deftly alternating between pressing her rolling pin and rotating the pie dough beneath it. The barest bit of tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth, her eyebrows drawn together in more than just concentration. She’d tried to hide the purple smudges beneath her eyes with make-up, but James was looking for them.

She clearly needed a laugh. And something else, although the rest he’d need to figure out yet.

While he puzzled over this, Lily finally noticed his presence, pausing in her process to smile up at him.

“Bit early to be thinking so hard,” she said.

“Who says I’m thinking hard?”

“That look of consternation on your face.”

“If I looked consternated, it was only because you looked consternated, and I was consternated trying to figure out what to do about your consternation.”

“What a concerning conundrum,” she quipped.

“Specifically,” he said, moving around the island toward her, “I was trying to come up with a version of the _did it hurt_ pick-up line tailored just for you, but then it got all convoluted because really you came to get me out of heaven, and you didn’t fall, if anything I did, and anyway I can definitively say there is no heaven, so….”

Her eyes alight, she snatched a wide piece of clingfilm from the counter, held it stretched in front of her face, and leaned forward on her tip-toes to press her lips against his.

Despite the barrier, he could feel the heat of her mouth, the softness of her lips, and the slight bump of his nose against hers. Their first kiss had been nothing like this, hadn’t sent his blood singing through his veins, or had his hands clutching at air at his sides.

Certainly the clingfilm needed getting used to, but get used to it he would. It would certainly be easier to adjust to than the fact that he could. Not. _Touch_.

When Lily sank back down, clingfilm still in hand, she beamed up at him.

“Innovative,” James managed, his heart battering against the confines of his chest.

“Yes.” She leaned back against the island, still looking up at him. “And you’re entirely ridiculous.”

“Just a bit. Although there’s not much incentive for me to stop as long as it ends like that.”

“We might not be able to touch,” she said, her voice darkening, “but my teachers always told me I was an exceptionally creative student.”

“Is that so, Evans?” James shifted forward, closer to her, but not close enough to touch. He placed a hand on the counter on either side of her, trapping her in place. “It just so happens that I was always encouraged to find more productive outlets for my creative impulses.”

If James wasn’t mistaken, a small shiver ran down Lily’s torso.

He certainly hadn’t gone to heaven, but this was some new type of hell. She had a smattering of barely-there freckles across the bridge of her nose, a heart-stopping curl to the corner of her lip, and a pinprick of a birthmark near her scalp, but he couldn’t explore any of it, except by sight.

“Did you want sugar or milk?” Albus asked.

James jumped back, his face burning.

“You’ve got awfully quiet footsteps,” he said, raking a hand through his hair and avoiding looking at Albus entirely.

For her part, Lily had spun around and was making a show of wiping excess flour into a pile on the island.

“I find a light step,” Albus said pleasantly, “reminds me to step lightly in more than just footwork. Sugar or milk?”

James wrenched his gaze up to Albus, reaching out to accept the steaming mug of tea. “Neither, thanks.”

Lily cleared her throat and faced them both, her cheeks putting on an excellent impersonation of her hair color.

“I believe I’ll go polish the cutlery,” Albus said, and James could have sworn his eyes twinkled behind his spectacles.

“Great,” Lily croaked, wrapping her arms around herself.

When Albus had left the kitchen, James met Lily’s eyes, and they both dissolved into laughter.

“It’s like getting caught by my _grandfather_ ,” Lily said.

“I feel like he all but winked at us,” James said, setting his mug on the counter. “I believe we have his tacit permission to snog.”

“We might have to keep things cool in the kitchen, though.” She turned back to her abandoned pie dough. “Because of Albus and Sirius and the customers. Also the health code.”

Lest he be too tempted by proximity, James stepped around the corner of the island. He rested his palms on the counter, leaned his torso over it toward Lily, and sent her a wicked look. “Fuck the health code.”

She flung a handful of flour at him, and he laughed as it fell well short of him.

“Where did you run off to last night?” she asked, resuming her dough preparation. “I know that look you had on your face. The one when you left yesterday, not your consternated one.”

“Oh, bit of this, bit of that. Bought a football and kicked it around some.”

This was, strictly speaking, the truth, but he neglected to mention his first stop at the bus station, where he’d met Algernon per their earlier agreement.

Together they’d wandered the city streets, feeling out James’s new neighborhood. Algernon made for an excellent wandering companion – his keen sense of smell had led them to a magical sweets shop with the best taffy James had ever sampled.

Then there had been football. Just him and a goal with no net, just him and his thoughts and, occasionally, Algernon’s attempt at goal-keeping.

After years of school schedules followed by work hours, he’d grown accustomed to filling most of his time with one thing or another, to needing to be at particular places at particular times. Now all of his routines had been tossed in the bin, replaced by…what, he wasn’t entirely sure yet.

Eventually Algernon had had to catch his bus back to the village. James had wandered home alone in the dark, football tucked under his arm, staring up at a nearly starless sky.

But Lily didn’t need to know about Algernon. She might think it too much of a risk, and while that was possibly true, it was a risk James had to take for his own sanity.

He picked up a curved steel implement with a cushy handle that Lily had left on the counter.

“What about you?” he asked. “Where’d you run off to last night?”

“Alien experimentation,” she said, draping her pie crust onto a tin. “Can’t believe you didn’t notice me getting abducted with all the lights.”

“I’ll make sure to keep a vigilant eye out tonight and beat them off with, er, whatever this is,” he said, wiggling the tool.

She flashed a small, pleased look up at him, and returned her attention to the crust, pressing it into place. “I was actually working on the investigation last night – swung by your office.”

James set down the implement. “I thought Sirius was going to do that.”

“He did go. Severus wouldn’t talk to him, so I took a stab at it. An attempt, I should say. No stabbing occurred.”

“But I thought….”

“I mean, I didn’t particularly want to see him, but, you know….”

He grinned. “You did it for me.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Too late. Already inflated by about ten percent. Nothing to be done about it.”

“Well, that hubris might come down a notch once you learn what he said.”

As she summarized Snape’s weak alibi, she pulled a heaping bowl of molding strawberries from the walk-in fridge and set it on the counter. James stared, perplexed, until she began picking them up one by one. At the touch of her skin, the strawberries morphed from deep, rotting maroon to vivid, ripe red, the mold vanishing into nothingness.

He nicked a revived strawberry out of the bowl and popped it in his mouth. It tasted exactly as a strawberry should, sweet and smooth and firm. There were certainly costs to Lily’s gifts, chief among them the touch issue, but at least he could enjoy the other perks.

“But then,” Lily said, “Severus said he wasn’t stupid enough to threaten someone he was going to kill.”

James sank down onto a wooden stool next to the island. “He’s got me there.”

“I told him we’d look into his alibi,” she said, coating the strawberries with a floury mixture, “and then I asked him what project he’d threatened you over—”

“I could have told you that.”

“Yes, but you couldn’t have told me why he cared so much.”

“Fair enough. Why did he care?”

“He denied it, but I’m certain Tom Riddle put him up to it.” She dumped the fruit into the crust. “Not that it matters – Severus still didn’t kill you over the cryonics project. He said it’s on hold.”

James felt himself smiling without any accompanying humor, and ruffled the short hairs at the back of his neck.

How many times had he sat fuming in his office after an encounter with Snape, always on the verge of firing him, always persuaded not to by his direct reports. He’d been promised time and time again that they needed Snape’s knowledge and expertise.

They’d needed him, but he had not needed them.

Before James had been murdered, this might have been worthy of outrage, and certainly would have got Snape fired. Now, however, it inspired little more than a vague pull at James chest, and a light, general hatred of everything.

“So Snape was working for Riddle,” James said, and gestured to his face. “Please note the complete and utter lack of surprise. Also the handsome. But more importantly right now, how little shock exists.”

“Your ego needs no stroking,” she said. “But yes, it seems likely that he fought you on Riddle’s orders. He tried to deny it, but he always liked Riddle, just from what he read in the paper. Then he met him at some Hogwarts alumni event and never looked back.”

“I should’ve known they’d be mates. They’ve both got such stellar personalities.”

“Oh. I suppose you would’ve met Riddle, with your circle and all.”

“He’s only tried to buy our company about ten times.”

“ _That’s_ interesting,” Lily said, carefully laying another pie crust on top of the strawberries. “With Riddle and Snape and….” She shook her head. “I had something there but I’ve lost it. But that assistant you liked – what was his name again?”

“Remus Lupin. Why?”

“Thought so. I’m sorry to report that he’s been disinvited to work there.”

James slumped forward, his arms dropping onto the counter, flour dust flying up in a tiny cloud around him. “Of course he has. Because why should anything good happen to good people?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you? That should count for something.”

“Did Snape tell you?”

“No, I ran into Peter Pettigrew on my way out last night,” she said, curling the edges of the crust into an elegant ripple. “We talked for a minute, and I saw the papers he had in his hand. There was a letter informing Mr. Lupin he’d been let go.”

James had been killed. Remus had been fired. Surely Peter was next, and would wake up to his flat on fire tomorrow morning.

“What did you do to her?” Lily asked.

James dragged his head up. “Hm?”

“The witch you pissed off,” she said. “I assume you refused her food or shelter or something, and that’s why she’s cursed you and your friends.”

He let out a laugh, rough and harsh. “It’s the only explanation, right?”

“Obviously,” Lily said, stepping away to slide her pie into the oven. “But I really think she’s gone overboard. Even if you had just offended her with the sight of your hair, she really didn’t have to take it out on your friends.”

James looked down to study the swirls in the flour. “They were just coworkers,” he said. “I mean, we went out for drinks a lot, watched footie on the weekends, but we...we just looked out for each other in the company.”

“Sounds like the things friends do to me.”

In retrospect, the three of them had rather taken to sharing lots of things about their personal lives, and hanging out more nights than not, and even going on a road trip that one time.

“Well,” James said, “when I put it that way…yeah. I guess so. And they’ve got off so well being friends with me. Remus, anyway. Peter will have his turn, too, I’m sure.”

She came to stand in front of him, crossing her arms. “You can’t take all the weight for this, the size of your ego aside. Peter will be fine, and I’m sure Remus will land on his feet. He sounds plenty capable.”

“He is, but his body is stupid and makes him have to miss days at a time. By all rights he should be doing some really brilliant job—he’s dead clever—but he always ends up getting fired over missing too much work.”

“Sounds like he was wasted as your assistant.”

“Obviously, yeah. We both knew it. But even I couldn’t promote him because of the absences – I couldn’t assign him projects more than a day or two out since we never knew when things would flare up, and he’d be out for a week or more.”

His aunt was in pieces, one of his best mates was unemployed, and James was stuck here, awash with pie but no authority, doing nothing remotely useful or important.

There had to be some way he could help. He was alive. He had a brain and a mouth and charm.

He had Lily.

He looked up at her. “You don’t happen to have another server position you need filled, do you?”

“Not much need for that, no…but let me mull it over, all right?”

“I’ll mull, too,” he said. “There must be _something_ we can do for Remus, even if it’s just sending him a fruit basket.”

“Does anyone not on a pension still send fruit baskets?”

“People who care about their friends’ nutrition do.”

Remus would need food. He always needed food. Fortunately, James was indeed awash with pie.

“Bring Remus a pie,” he said. “Please? And make sure he’s all right. You can ask him stuff for the case so you have an excuse. Please.”

“Of course I can bring him a pie.”

“He always knew all the office gossip,” James said. “Comes from being in the assistant network. Remus knew how to butter up little old ladies, but not in a Red Riding Hood sort of way.”

“Still set on the corporate angle, then?”

He sent her a plaintive look. “Well, it’s not like Peter had the balls to do me in.”

“Maybe he wanted Remus all to himself.”

“Thanks ever so for that mental image. Please touch me now and be done with it.”

“You nailed it that time. Not morbid at all.”

“Cheers.”

“I’ll go talk to Remus later,” she said, glancing out at the dining area. “But in the meantime, Albus is looking the other way.” She nodded toward the box of clingfilm on the counter. “If you’re not too upset, that is.”

Someone had killed James.

More importantly, someone close to him had done the deed. After all, people didn’t accidentally drop arsenic into other people’s opened milk cartons. There was intention, and there was motive.

James could sit there and mope about all of that.

Or.

He sprung to his feet.

“Nope,” he said, reaching for the box. “Everything’s completely brilliant.”

\--

By the time the shop opened, nearly a dozen new pies sat gracefully on the tower, and James had lost count of the clingfilm kisses Lily had snuck him whenever Albus’s back was turned. He helped out where he could, serving up pie and clearing tables and loading the dishwasher. Food service had a consistent, mindless routine to it, one which he sorely appreciated at the moment.

After the lunch rush, Lily headed out the back door with Remus’s address in one hand and a boxed-up apple pie in the other. James stepped out onto the street not long after her, once more without any particular destination in mind, but this time alone. Algernon couldn’t risk coming back so soon, not when he had Minerva to look after.

As it turned out, though, exploring was not nearly as fun on his own, and only in part because there were not many novelties to be discovered. This part of greater London did not differ terribly from the parts he’d already been familiar with. The same types of shops, homes, and buildings lined the streets, if a bit less posh than where he lived.

Had lived.

After an hour of watching everyone else hurry along the street to wherever they needed to be, James abandoned his efforts and headed back to The Pie Hole. There was little else to do.

As he entered through the front door, someone called out, “Oi.”

Sirius Black sat in a corner booth, wearing his leather jacket and a peeved expression. James considered ignoring him, but given what he’d seen of Sirius so far, Sirius would not permit such behavior.

James slid in across from him.

“Where’s Lily?” Sirius asked.

“Wrangling turtles,” James said.

“Is that so.”

“No. She’s actually starting a mining company as part of an insurance scam.”

Sirius gave him an even look. “Of course.”

“She’s off talking to my assistant,” James conceded. “Should I have her ring you when she gets back?”

Sirius muttered something under his breath, but James had the distinct impression it was a comment only about Lily.

“Did she tell you how it went with Snape last night?” Sirius asked.

“Er, yeah, did she not tell you?”

“Yes, she told me everything, so now I’m asking you for your secondhand recollection since I value your opinion so highly.”

James blinked. “You know, I’m getting the sense that you’re a fan of sarcasm.”

“No mere fan – I’m captain of the team, thank you.”

“For the record, I was vice-captain at the office. My assistant never claimed the title, but we all knew it was his.”

“I’m not asking for your personal memories either. Just give me the recap of Lily’s interrogation.”

“Since you asked so nicely,” James said.

As he provided the details of Lily’s earlier summation, Sirius sat back with his arms crossed, periodically deigning to nod in acknowledgment.

“Shite,” Sirius said at the end. “We’re out of leads, then.”

“For now. That’s why I sent her off to my assistant – if anything wonky was going on in the company, he’d know about it.”

Sirius gave another nod, this one begrudging. “It’s the only play we’ve got left. Seems there’s no use for me, though, if she’s so intent on doing this alone.”

“It was my idea for her to go. Knowing Remus, Lily’s approach will work much better than yours.”

The barest hint of impressed stole over Sirius’s face, which he broke by starting to slide out of the booth. He’d only half stood up when Albus appeared beside the table, as suddenly as though he’d teleported, with two plates of pie in hand. Glorious strawberry, by the look of it.

“Lily left specific instructions,” Albus said, setting the pie on the table, “that I was to offer Sirius a warm slice à la mode. The other piece, I admit, was my own initiative.” He smiled pleasantly and wandered off once more.

Sirius sank bank into place with a harrumph.

“About damn time,” he said, and picked up his fork.

James was not about to turn down a fresh piece of his favorite pie, and he was not petulant enough to go eat in the kitchen alone. He and Sirius locked eyes and had a clear moment of mutual agreement that they would both remain for the duration of their consumption. They may not have been mates, but they both knew this was pie that deserved to be savored.

They began eating in silence. Sirius had made his thoughts on James’s existence clear, and James, still unused to the marvel of Lily’s pies, was content to focus on delighting in his dessert. Halfway through their slices, though, Sirius’s napkin fell to the ground. As Sirius reached down to fetch it, James caught a flash of something blue along his side, hidden beneath his leather coat.

“Is that a gun holster?” James asked. “A _knitted_ gun holster?”

“Yeah,” Sirius said, sitting up properly again. “What of it?”

“Lily told me you knitted—”

“For stress relief.”

“—but a _gun holster_?”

“It’s custom-sized that way,” Sirius said. “D’you want to see it up close? And then maybe the end of the barrel, too?”

“I tried to crochet a hat once. It was terrible. A gun holster is dead impressive.”

“Yes.” Sirius pulled his jacket open to give James a better view. “It is impressive. Fine alpaca wool, too. Soft to the touch.”

“Is that how you got started in the P.I. business, then? You’d knitted yourself a gun holster and figured, hell, why not private investigations?”

Sirius let his coat fall shut. “Is that how you decided to become a corporate manager? You got a spreadsheet once and figured there was no alternative?”

James shook his head. “See, this is what I get for attempting friendly conversation. I will now shut up,” he said, and shoved a bite of pie into his mouth.

“And what, retract your compliment about my holster, too, while you’re at it?”

James took his time chewing, musing over his options.

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “the compliment stands. Or sits. Whichever you prefer.”

“The biggest compliment you could pay me is to disappear.”

James studied Sirius’s elegantly tousled hair, aristocratic nose, and set mouth. This was a man not used to sharing. This was a man used to getting what he wanted.

This was also a man who pretended not to stand on pretence, and yet….

“Please continue this territorial bullshit,” James said. “I completely get it – she can only have one friend. We’ve got to make a competition of it.”

“You’re making me regret not removing my gun from my holster earlier.”

“Fine. Be ridiculous. I know ridiculous, trust me, and this is textbook. Forget I even tried. Never mind, I’m sure you already have.”

James ducked his head to focus on his pie, appreciating the flaky crust and the delicate flavoring of the filling.

A mere two people knew he was alive again, understood the intricacies and inexplicability of his existence, but only one of them made for decent company. That wasn’t bleak, James told himself. It would be fine. He would make do.

After a few minutes, when James was close to finishing off his slice, Sirius said gruffly, “I got in it for the money.”

“The money?” James asked, as though no squabble had occurred. “With Lily helping you, you must make scads. You really need that much?”

“I’m used to a certain level of lifestyle,” Sirius said, with a put-on air of nonchalance. “This arrangement allows me to maintain it.”

“A wardrobe full of leather coats and homemade gun holsters. Peculiar, that.”

“Says the dead man.”

James shoved his plate to the side, replacing the space with his forearms. “But just money? Really? Not, I dunno, helping people or righting wrongs or whatever.”

“Yes, I’m up all night over other people getting themselves killed. It’s pure agony. Torturous, even.”

“There’s no way you’re only in it for the money. The challenge, maybe. Getting to show how clever you are. Maybe meeting women, what do I know.”

“An awful lot of speculation for someone you just met.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I can’t believe Lily would be partners with someone so shallow.”

“This shallow man is helping solve your bloody murder.”

“It would be an insult if I thought you were that shallow, but like I said, I don’t.”

Sirius eyed him, then pushed his plate away and moved to the end of the booth.

“Believe what you want,” he said, climbing out of the seat. “I’ve got other cases I can work on if you’ve got nothing for me.”

James had tried. The odds of success had been low from the start, but he would be fine. He would make himself fine. Particularly once they caught his killer.

“If you want to look for new leads,” James said, “you could always try working some of the higher-ups at the company. See what they’re willing to say. Or not, depending.”

Sirius considered this. “Lily works from the bottom. I work from the top. Not the worst approach.”

“Careful,” James sighed, pushing himself out of the booth. “Or I might think you’re starting to like me.”

\--

Lily took a winding, bumpy bus ride to Remus’s neighborhood on the far side of London. James had assured her that her car would be safer at home, and the extra travel time provided her the opportunity to muse over the previous few days: the sweet crook of James’s smile; the electric spark of rekindled romance; and, of course, the gaping wound of having killed someone.

Her life prior to James’s reappearance had had such stability, such routine, traits she’d hardly complained about. She’d had plenty of uncertainty in her childhood and had not exactly been eager for more. Life had been good.

Then she’d made a choice. Any unpleasant emotions she’d experienced in the past week were a direct result of her own actions.

And yet she regretted none of it.

Feeling stiff and a little overripe, Lily disembarked the bus. She trekked down the street, following James’s directions, and came to a halt several blocks away in front of a squat, sagging cardboard box of a building.

She bounded up the three crumbling stairs, buzzed the flat number James had given her, and then buzzed it once more when there was no accompanying sound. Four attempts later, the system finally sizzled, popped ominously, and provided the desired tone.

“Yeah?” a rough voice soon demanded through the wiring.

“Hi,” Lily said, “I’m looking for Remus Lupin.”

“Yeah,” said the voice, and then there was a click.

Lily stared at the machine. Was the _yeah_ a _yeah I’m Remus_ (unlikely, based on James’s portrayal of the man), or _yeah come on up_ (in which case the buzzer system had failed to open it for her), or _yeah fuck off_ (not unlikely given the feel of the neighborhood).

Within a minute, she could hear slow, soft footsteps approaching the door, which opened to reveal a young man with kind eyes and tidy hair.

“Yes?” he said, his voice pleasant and polite.

“Hi, I’m Lily, Lily Evans, and I’m investigating the murder of James Potter. I was hoping to get a few moments of your time.”

Unlike many people she’d gone to interview over the years, Remus didn’t seem ready to dismiss her out of hand for wasting his time. Instead, the shadow of a smile he’d worn disappeared, his face somehow more lined and haggard at the mere mention of James.

“Here,” she said, holding aloft her offering. “I brought you a pie.”

“Er,” he said, taking the box. “Thank you. Forgive me, but I feel as though I’m in some strange social ritual here, only I’m unfamiliar with the rules.”

“You mean your primary school didn’t cover the socially acceptable response to a private investigator handing you pie?”

“More evidence of the failing standards of our school system, clearly.”

“Think of it as a mourning gift,” Lily said. “Don’t people always bring food to mourners?”

“Not to mourning assistants, typically, no.”

“Then consider it a P.I. special. And maybe an _I’m sorry you’ve been fired_ present.”

“I see you’ve investigated me already.” He glanced back down the corridor. “I’d invite you in, only it’s rather loud at the moment. My flatmate recently broke up with his boyfriend, and decided the only appropriate wallowing technique is to blast ballads. Do you fancy a walk?”

“I generally prefer to actually hear the answers to my questions, so yes, absolutely.”

They strolled down rubbish-strewn streets, past shops that had either been graffitied or closed down, and ended up in a tiny park with more weeds than grass. Several benches ringed a swing set with missing seats, leaving only chains dangling from a rusting metal arch. They cleared some wrappers off of a bench and sat down, at which point Lily pulled out a fork from her purse.

“Don’t feel like you need to wait to eat on my account,” she said, holding it out to him handle first. “It’s best as fresh as possible.”

Remus eyed the utensil. “It seems a bit crass to eat in front of someone else.”

Lily withdrew another fork out of her purse. “I thought that might be the case and came prepared.”

“Do you often find yourself breaking pie with strangers in ragged parks?”

“The nature of being a part-time private investigator and part-time pie baker.”

Apparently mollified, Remus accepted a fork and dug in, the box resting in the space between them. Lily allowed both of them a few bites before she started in on her questioning.

“I’d like to be clear up front,” she said, “that I’m not here because you’re a suspect. As far as I can tell, there’s a negative percent chance that you killed James.”

“I can’t say I’m unhappy to hear that, but then I’m at a bit of a loss as to why you’re here. Not that I object to your visit, given that this pie is phenomenal.”

“Thanks.” She flashed a smile at him. “I wanted to talk to you because we’re getting the sense that this was related to James’s job. He doesn’t seem to have had a wide circle of friends, which means most people he knew were at work, which means statistically one of them did it.”

“I completely agree that it seems like the most promising angle.” He stuck his fork in the pie. “He worked too much, you know. He should’ve had loads of friends, maybe been in a football league or something, but he was always at the office, trying to fix one thing or another. That, or at his aunt’s.”

“I suppose you could conclude he loved his family, in whatever way he could.”

“Well put,” he said, his eyebrows notching up. “You’ve clearly done your reading on him.”

“Volumes of it.”

Remus rested his hands in his lap, his chin down. “While your reasoning is sound, I’ve been over it myself a dozen times, and I can’t think of anyone who’d want to kill James, inside the company or out.”

He fell silent for a moment, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed, the line of his mouth tightening only briefly.

Like a good Englishman, he was trying to hide his grief, but Lily had years of observational experience at her disposal.

The tar of guilt in her chest seeped into new crevices. Remus did not have to be grieving.

But guilt would have to wait. Lily needed leads.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could be of more help on this.”

“I think you can,” she said gently. “You might not have suspects, but I bet you’ve got some other information I can use. You were an assistant, and I know how those positions talk to one another.”

“Mm, yes, the gossip mill. Online chat systems have made staying on top of rumors much more convenient.”

“What was the latest piece of gossip around the office? Before or after James died.”

“With regard to the murder itself, no one really had any sense of who might’ve done it. They speculated, of course, and it was certainly the dominant topic of conversation, but no one knew anything.”

“Nothing else odd, though? No gossip about changes or threats or anything?”

Remus watched a sparrow on the ground hop toward them, its head cocked, waiting and hoping for a crumb to fall.

“Something was brewing,” he said. “Right at the end. I heard that some of the board members had meetings, and I quote, _across town,_ but I wasn’t there long enough to figure out what that meant.”

“It’s something, at least, which is more than I had before.” Lily fetched her notebook out of her coat pocket and jotted down a few words, then referred to the list of topics she’d wanted to broach with him. “Did James keep you up to date on the projects his staff were working on?”

“I had a cursory understanding of them – James likes to talk things through sometimes, get an outside perspective.”

“Did you two ever talk about the cryonics project?”

“Only once. We discussed whether it would be worth continuing. As interesting as it seemed, I thought it fell outside the mission of the company. It was more about extending people’s lives than improving quality of life. James agreed.”

On the whole James had proved a reliable source in matters of his murder, but there was one area that would benefit from outside confirmation.

“I’ve heard,” she said, careful not to let her voice stray into interested tones, “that Severus Snape wasn’t best pleased about that project ending.”

“You’ve heard right, but then again, he and James couldn’t speak without arguing.” He cast her a sidelong glance. “Is Snape a suspect?”

She shook her head, decidedly looking at her notebook. “What happened to the cryonics project after James died?”

“I had the impression that some staff had started it up again—took advantage of the confusing transition to keep working on it—but then a few days later they stopped.”

“What did they start working on instead?”

“Something to do with vines. I believe they’re from South America.”

Lily squashed the thrill of connection that ran through her. Podmore had been working on Peruvian plants before he’d been murdered, but his most recent project had been missing from his lab. There was certainly more than one type of South American plant, but to have two deaths so close to the same topic, and within days of each other….

She kept her voice calm and asked, “Do you know what the plants are supposed to do, exactly?”

“I didn’t hear much about it, only bits and pieces. As I understood it, there was some extract that could be derived from the vines. One of the researchers referred to it, with great skepticism, as ‘an elixir of life.’”

Lily raised an eyebrow. “Elixir of life?”

“My thoughts precisely. It was hardly the sort of project James would have allowed them to work on.”

If Severus had only fought for the cryonics project on Riddle’s orders, then only Riddle could have made him drop it. But Lily could not explain why Riddle would have gone to such lengths to direct the work of James’s staff, unless he’d sought to squander company resources on random projects.

Only Severus would have despised useless, wasteful work like that. And there was no clear reason for Riddle to have Severus start a new project with stolen work that James’s replacement could immediately shut down.

These were thoughts for later, when she could discuss them openly with Sirius and James.

“Right, then,” she said, checking her notebook. “When was the last time you saw James?”

“The day before he died. We were both at work that day, and then we met again later at the pub.”

“But James didn’t go straight from work to the pub, did he?”

“No, he told us he was going home to walk his cat, and I stayed at work to finish something up.”

She scribbled down a few notes. “So it was you and James and….”

Remus did not answer at once, and Lily sent him a curious look.

“The thing is,” he said slowly, “I’m not entirely sure I should say.”

“Why not?”

He looked away, his mouth not tense, but closed.

James hadn’t named who else had been there, but he’d only had so many people in his life. Remus likely had a similar number of friends, and seemed, like James, the type to defend them until the very end.

“Remus,” she said softly. “I already have a strong guess about who else was there. You’re trying to protect a friend, and I can respect that. I can also promise you that I have no interest in locking up the wrong person.”

“But there is a reward you’ll get for solving the murder, yes? Your incentive is to put someone away, regardless of the truth.”

She laid her notebook on her lap, and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “The reward is beside the point for me. James and I…well…he was my first kiss.”

She’d meant to say neighbor, and yet.

Remus looked back to her, lifting his eyebrows. “I see.”

“So this is…it’s a personal investigation,” she said, willing her cheeks to return to their normal color.

“It must have been an excellent first kiss. I’d hardly go chasing down leads for mine if she were murdered.”

“Well, it wasn’t _excellent_. We were only nine.”

Remus smiled.

If recounting tales about James helped improve Remus’s mood, if only for a minute, then Lily could do that for him. She owed him some mote of truth in exchange for lying by omission about James.

“We lived across the street from each other,” she went on.

“Ah,” Remus said with a knowing look.

“And then one day my dad and his mum died—”

Remus’s eyes went wide.

“—and they were buried on the same day, and anyway, we found each other in the cemetery, and it was….”

Memorable was one word for it. As were chaste, and sweet, and perfect.

“Unique,” Remus supplied. “That would certainly leave an impression.”

“Oh, James definitely did. He was…James.” Lily picked up her notebook again, hoping Remus interpreted her clear affection for James as nostalgia, and not as the fluttering sensation that accompanied new romance. “I want to help him, just like you want to help Peter.”

He looked pained. “Lily….”

“It was Peter, wasn’t it? You three were mates. You want to protect who’s left. But I’ve met Peter, all right, and I completely agree he’d never do James in.”

Remus remained silent, the swing set chains creaking in the breeze.

He was quite clearly no fool. He would not have held out so long over something insubstantial, and Lily needed any lead she could get.

“Peter being at the pub doesn’t implicate him,” she said. “Which means something must have happened, something that you think I’ll use against him, but I honestly and legitimately only want to find the real killer. It’s what James would have wanted. So if you’re protecting Peter because you’re afraid I’ll wrongly try to pin it on him, I won’t. I swear.”

Lily waited. A bus barreled by on the street, and then another.

Remus wove his fingers together while the corner of his jaw clenched, and then released.

“It didn’t register as important,” he said, “until we found out James had died, and I thought….”

“You think it could make him look guilty.”

“Possibly. I don’t know why he—the point is, I don’t believe he killed James any more than I believe I killed James while sleepwalking.”

“If I go ask him about it, it’ll help to prove he didn’t do it. And won’t that be a relief to you? To know what really happened with him. You won’t have to wonder about it anymore.”

Remus placed his hands on his knees, his shoulders tense. His jumper hung loose around him, and not only because it was quite clearly two sizes too big. Any clothing would have dwarfed a frame so close to starved.

James had been onto something with the fruit basket.

“It’s only…Peter came to the pub from the wrong direction,” Remus said. “I was early, and I waited outside for them. Peter lives and works east of the office, but I saw him walking up from the west.”

“The direction of James’s flat,” Lily guessed.

“There are loads of possible explanations,” he said. “He could’ve been running an errand.”

“Exactly,” Lily agreed. “It’s hardly a gun, much less a smoking one.”

“All the same, it looks a little suspicious for him to have come that way, and Peter wouldn’t do well with the police banging down his door.”

“You didn’t tell the police about this?”

Remus gave her a measured look. “It didn’t come up.”

Lily returned with a decisive nod – a promise. He was trusting her with this, and she would use it appropriately. This would be no great burden. Peter ranked low on her suspect list, tucked even beneath James’s landlady.

“I’ll find out what happened,” she said, “and I’ll tell you so you can stop worrying, yeah? We’ll both feel silly when it turns out he went to the chemist.”

That drew a smile out of Remus, one that seemed much lighter than the ones she’d initially got from him.

This had been weighing on him.

She’d given him a James story, a delicious pie, and a chance for confession. It hardly made up for lying to him, but it was something. She’d have to look up fruit basket companies later.

Or….

Another idea bubbled to the surface, one which she stored away for further consideration.

“I’ll leave you to your pie,” she said, standing up and tucking her notebook away. “I’ve got to get back to my shop. Keep the forks and the box, I’ve got plenty.”

“Thanks for bringing it.” Remus climbed to his feet, one hand cradling the box, the other extending toward her. “And for your discretion.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, shaking his hand and smiling. “I’m definitely on your side.”

\--

Later that afternoon, James awoke from his nap to the sizzling sound of fatty meat connecting with hot metal. He remained where he lay, curled up on Lily’s sofa, and caught sight of her in the kitchen. She’d cocked her hip to rest against the counter, her back to James, her head slightly angled. At some point she’d changed into a yellow dress, one with a skirt that flared out, and otherwise followed her figure rather nicely.

This was his life, now. Napping on couches and waking up to food and staring at Lily. Kissing Lily, if he liked, or even more than that, so long as it wasn’t direct contact.

This woman had brought him back from the dead. She’d given him a new life.

If only he knew what he was supposed to do with it.

Getting to know Lily better, he thought, should be at the top of his list. They’d known each other as well as children could, but as he’d grown more complex, more faceted over the years, she’d no doubt done the same. Key pieces hadn’t changed—her humor, her smile, her love of pies—but some things….

For one, she’d befriended _Severus_ _Snape_. And then, later, Sirius Black. In short, a prick and a twat. They were not at all the friends James would have expected from her, which left him wondering what else had yet to be revealed that would make him question her judgment.

Bringing him back from the dead did not rank among her questionable decisions. She’d put herself at risk of exposure based on sixty seconds of adult James, but that was classic reckless behavior that he’d have expected of her. Or, honestly, of himself.

He rolled onto his back, one hand tucking itself neatly between his head and the throw pillow.

She was changed, and yet the same. As best he could tell, Lily Evans mostly made pies. She also woke the dead and helped solve their murders. She’d hired an eccentric old man as a server, and had a supposedly money-chasing fiend for a partner. Beyond that, though….

Her dad was gone, her mum might as well be, and her sister…her sister. Where had Petunia gone? She and Lily had got along better than many other siblings growing up, at least as far as James had seen, but then again two decades was a long time.

This left Lily with Albus and Sirius and, it appeared, no one else save James.

James she had for good. He couldn’t exactly go anywhere he pleased, couldn’t truly support himself with his current condition of legally deceased. Not that he had anywhere to go. And here there was pie to eat and a bed near hers, things he could hardly complain about.

Only it rankled, a bit, not to have a real say about his own life. There were restrictions on his renewed existence. Safe, sound restrictions, but restrictions nonetheless.

But that was his life now. Surely a somewhat restricted life was better than no life at all. Even if those restrictions were not seeing his friends or his family, and only occasional visits to his cat….

He could live with that.

He could.

“Oh,” Lily said, poking her head into the living room. “Good, you’re up just in time for bacon sandwiches.”

Her thoughtfulness had not changed one bit.

It was not her fault he’d been killed. It was not her fault they had to keep his existence a secret.

“Have I mentioned,” he said, “how spectacular you are?”

“Not today, no.” She rested her shoulder against the doorway, hands held behind her. “Falling behind on your compliment quota already.”

“How far behind am I, exactly? Are we talking bronze medal or second to last place, the worst place because you only beat one person?”

“I think fourth place is the worst – you came so close to getting a medal but didn’t.”

“All right, for an individual’s definition of worst, then, am I in worst place?”

“You’re definitely not in worst place, but remember the bar’s set pretty high at the start of a relationship. The beginning’s when we’re supposed to be fawning all over each other.”

“Fawning I can get behind, but…I dunno.” James climbed to his feet, stretching his arms out to his sides, his muscles pulling taut and awake. “It doesn’t feel like the beginning of a relationship. Not really.”

“It doesn’t, does it? Which is just as well, I think. Easier, in a lot of ways.”

It was easier, only…only they’d hopped over the initial ‘learning about each other’ phase that typically preceded moving in together. He might not have expected to know prior to living with Lily whether she preferred doing laundry or dishes, or whether she got fussed about the toilet seat being left up or down. But other, more core questions remained yet, like whether she intended to keep the shop forever or whether she wanted to have children.

He knew her, and yet not at all.

“James?”

“Ah, sorry, still clearing out cobwebs in my head.”

“If I’d known the spiders had got into your brain, I would’ve made sure to get rid of them before waking you.”

“See,” James said, strolling up to her, “that’s exactly the tone I’d like to master. Light enough to be funny. Not dark enough to be depressing.”

“I’ve always been a quicker study than you,” she said, eyes flashing, lips curving.

“You,” he said, placing a hand on the wall next to her head and slowly leaning toward her, “are just trying to rile me up.”

“I’ve got it on good authority that I’m particularly talented at riling.”

The crook of her smile demanded tending to, but he had no clingfilm, or paper, or any other barrier ready. His hand at his side folded into a fist as he stood there, unable to do anything to show her that he could keep up, unable to do anything but yearn.

Fortunately, she’d always been the better planner.

She whipped out a sheet of clingfilm from behind her and launched onto her toes, closing the gap between their mouths in no time.

This, at least, he could learn quickly. This, at least, they could do without backstory. All this required was savoring the tiny noises escaping from her throat and the faint hitching of her breath.

“Take the clingfilm,” she said, and James did so without breaking stride.

 _Finally_ , her fingers grazed along his side, finally they made contact—

He jerked back from her, the clingfilm dropping from one hand. “ _Lily_ —”

She held up her hands, each covered in a thick, pale winter glove, and waved them at him. His eyes flicked down to her gloves, up to her face, and then back to her hands.

“You _cheater_ ,” he said, and covered her mouth with his, the clingfilm safely between them once more.

Her hands brushed up along his sides, wandered over his ribcage, and skimmed across his shoulders to find the nape of his neck. In sheer quantity of contact, it was nothing, not nearly enough, and yet it left him scorching.

James nearly growled in frustration.

“This was meant to be a quick test,” she said, but then kissed him again. “The sandwiches.”

He loved the gloves. He loved Lily’s innovations. But he did not love cold bacon sandwiches.

“Right,” he breathed, and kissed her once more. “Break. For sandwiches. Then more exploring with the gloves, yeah?”

“Deal.”

When he’d lowered the clingfilm, she reached up to rake her gloved fingers through his hair. James, whose scalp had always been on the sensitive side of the spectrum, nearly trembled as she pulled at his follicles. She was _right fucking there_.

And yet.

There were too many _and yets_ in his life at the moment.

“I’ve been dying to do this,” she said, threading her fingers through his locks again.

“If you don’t stop,” he managed, “I can’t be held responsible for what happens next.”

“Threats only encourage me.”

“That’s my line,” he said through clenched teeth.

She withdrew her hand, laughing, and tilted a sly smile at him. “Prove it.”

James compelled himself to take one deep breath and one deliberate step backwards. The no touching piece aside, he took no issue with this new aspect of his life.

“More later,” he forced out. “Right now…bacon sandwiches. You remember all my favorites.”

“It’s because I’m fabulous and you wish you were as good as me.”

“You’ve always had me all sorted out, haven’t you?”

She responded with a wordless look, one that tugged like a hook at his chest.

He slid past her into the kitchen. If he didn’t cram a sandwich in soon, there was no telling what he might be tempted to do with his mouth.

“So,” he said, his voice coming out hoarse. He cleared his throat and dropped into a seat at her table for two. “What’d Remus say?”

Lily recounted her encounter over dinner, highlighting Remus’s recollections of the office gossip after James’s death, and the tabled status of the cryonics project.

“Yes,” James said impatiently, “but how did he look? How was he?”

He almost regretted asking. Lily’s response had him sagging forward with his elbows on the table, his neck propped up on his hands. An insurmountable, invisible barrier had formed between him and his own friends. He was no longer in a position to affect their lives, apart from inspiring grief.

The few new facts for the case proved little consolation.

The _across town_ comment meant nothing to him – innumerable companies and government agencies were scattered around the city. The board members could have been up to anything, even something as innocuous and standard as figuring out how to handle James’s share of the company.

“But I really think,” Lily said, “that the new project they’re working on could be tied to another one of Sirius’s cases. Podmore was studying some top-secret South American plant, which could have been vines. He hadn’t released the details to the public yet, just met with a few potential funders, and then someone killed him and stole his work.”

“Sign me up for the list of people who’d believe Snape would use stolen work without hesitating,” James said mournfully, “but I also don’t think he’s thick enough to kill the other researcher.”

“No, that’s not his style. But I can’t help but think that the same person who convinced Severus to keep the cryonics project alive is the same one who told him to table it.”

James couldn’t find the energy to look up at her. “I know you mean Riddle,” he said, “but I don’t want you to because I hate the idea of him being even more involved in this.”

“I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong.”

“It seems…far-fetched. Almost.” He dragged himself out of his seat, stacked their plates together, and carried them to the sink. “Except that Riddle’s been accused of theft before. Always managed to hide any actual proof, the prick.”

“Something to think about, though, right?” She brought the glasses over and leaned back against the counter. “Maybe I’m too desperate to help Sirius solve the Podmore case. It’s completely stalled out.”

“I don’t see the connection between the projects—I mean, why would Riddle care about either—but yeah, it’s not out of the question….”

James began scrubbing a plate while Lily picked up a towel.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said. “D’you know, there was one thing Remus didn’t want to tell me. It’s almost funny because it’s so minor, but he was really worked up about it.”

James glanced sideways at her. “There’s usually about six degrees of separation between Remus and worked up. What got him there?”

“The night before you died, you all went to the pub, yeah? And Remus got there first, but he said he saw Peter coming to the pub from the direction of your flat, not work or his flat.”

James paused in the middle of handing her a dripping plate. “Remus was upset about _that_?”

“I know,” Lily said, reaching out to take it from him with two fingers. “Like Peter could’ve actually killed you.”

James started in on the second plate with a scoff. “I’ve never even seen him manage to off a fly. Not that he hasn’t tried, mind. He probably went to the chemist or something.”

“That’s exactly what I said. I think this link to Podmore is the more promising lead.”

“I mean, what does Remus even think could’ve happened?” He handed her the plate and pressed his glasses up his nose with the back of his wrist. “Yeah, Peter knew my flat well enough, but he didn’t have a key to get in.”

“He couldn’t have got a copy made without you or your landlady noticing.”

“And he’s no lockpick, that’s for sure.”

Lily grinned. “Maybe he teleported.”

“Or flew.”

“Or broke your window, jumped in, poisoned your milk, and then had a handy window repair man ready to replace the glass, all without the neighbors seeing.”

James snorted and picked up one of the drinking glasses. “Well, my windows don’t face a lot of other flats, so they might not have seen, but they definitely would’ve heard the noise.”

“Fine, so he didn’t break the window. He just knew you’d leave it unlocked that evening. Obviously. Since you live on the ground floor and are stupid enough to do that.”

“Clearly the timing worked out impeccably…only….”

James stared at the glass in his hand, then shook his head and handed it to Lily.

“What?” she asked. “You don’t actually think….”

“No, of course not.” He rested his palms on the edge of the sink. “But just thinking about the window—the night before we went to the pub, Peter and Remus came over for the Tottenham match. Peter got cold so he went to close the window…but that was two days before I died, and he’s always had the body temperature of a snake.”

“But he would’ve locked the window when he closed it.”

“I assumed he had. I didn’t think to check.”

“Well, was it locked the next day?”

“I didn’t touch the window…. No, wait. I did close it before I went to bed – Algernon had managed to open it a crack….”

James realized he’d been staring at the cupboard in front of him for too long, the faucet still running.

“So the window was unlocked?” she asked.

James grabbed the frying pan and weighed it in his hand, considering. “Algernon’s never been able to trip the lock before, but I just assumed he’d mastered it….”

“He probably did, knowing him.”

James felt terribly hollow all of a sudden, a hollowness that quickly flooded with guilt at even beginning to suspect Peter.

“But anyway,” he said, taking the dish brush to the pan with determination, “even if Peter had left the window unlocked, and then came back when I was on a walk to climb in and poison me…all of which is really unlikely…he had no reason to kill me.”

“I know.”

James paused in his washing, permitting himself a short two seconds to wonder—but it was ridiculous.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, resuming his task. “Peter didn’t do it.”

“Of course he didn’t.”

“I’m just ruling out possibilities, right? That’s what you said we should do.”

She nodded. “Opportunity without motive is pretty weak from a P.I. perspective.”

“I mean, my landlady would’ve had an easier time of getting into my flat,” he said, handing her the pan handle first, “and she had much more motive.”

Lily’s eyebrows notched up. “Let me guess: raucous parties.”

James savored his own laugh, delighted to have moved on from doubt, his second of mistrust left far behind.

“Algernon,” he said simply.

She gave him a look as she tucked the pan into the drawer under the oven. “Are you allowed to have a cat there, James?”

“ _Yes._ But he’s been known to, erm, sick up in front of the upstairs neighbor’s door when they get too loud.”

“You’re the crochety downstairs neighbor!”

James shrugged and tackled the remaining silverware. “I can wear earplugs, but Algernon can’t – I tried. I even tried some earmuffs, but he was having none of it.”

“You are a certified lunatic.”

“So much for either of us reaching the compliment quota today.”

“Oh, trust me,” she said, glancing at the gloves she’d left on the counter. “I have a feeling you’ll come up with plenty later on.”

There were a great many things James had not yet learned about Lily Evans. He did not know when she’d opened the shop, what perfume she preferred, or why she had two sponges in her sink. But as she stood in her kitchen, faintly lit by the afternoon sun sneaking in from the living room windows, he got her to send a small, deliberate smile up at him.

That, at least, he knew how to do.

\--

In the morning, deeply content after an evening of clingfilm, compliments, and a fair deal of pleased swearing, Lily found herself humming as she rolled out the morning batch of pie dough. James had hopped in the shower—the one place they hadn’t got to the night before—while she’d gone to prepare the shop for opening. By herself, for once, with Albus home sick.

Her hips began to sway to the unnamed tune she was inventing on the spot. This was perhaps a slightly overblown reaction to one night, but was also a reaction she couldn’t seem to stop.

It wasn’t as though she’d never slept with anyone before. She was a confident, attractive woman with the attendant range of options. The novelty lay instead with the expected long-term continuation of the dalliance. She’d never managed a long-term relationship before, not with the requirement of revealing her ability hanging over her head.

To date, things had generally not turned out well when she’d disclosed her prowess for waking the dead. She’d told Petunia, who’d called her a freak. She’d told Severus, who’d eventually turned out to be a terrible person for several reasons, one of which was wanting to use her abilities. Only Sirius, who’d found out completely by accident, had never been bothered by her re-aliving talent.

But here was James, someone she’d told the truth to within a minute of their adult relationship, someone who knew and had not found it off-putting or disconcerting. Perhaps some of that insouciance was preoccupation with solving his own murder, but somehow she sensed he would not belatedly panic over her ability in several weeks’ time.

For once, it seemed, she had a proper boyfriend.

Of course, this was contingent on James not abandoning her once he learned someone else had died in his stead, or that she’d accidentally killed his mother.

She would disclose both truths, but not at once – together they might be too much. The former, it seemed, would be the appropriate first step. She simply had to confess and endure the consequences.

She would tell him. Today. Before she became too used to lying.

The back door snicked open, and she glanced over her shoulder to smile at James as he strutted in.

“I know it’s rude to get into intimate details in the workplace,” he said, kicking the door shut behind him, “but I’ve just had the most amazing night of sex.”

“If you keep on like that,” she said, with a strong push of the rolling pin, “I’ll have to file a sexual harassment claim with the manager.”

“Oh, no, if you do that, she’ll sexually harass me right back.” His footsteps drew closer, stopping directly behind her. “I know her type. She can’t resist a rogue like me.”

Lily let out a sharp laugh. “A _rogue_?”

“Yes, you see, I believe that this pie shop could do more, you know? I’ve got dreams, Lily, and I won’t let some sexual marvel of a manager keep me from getting them.”

“Oh, really?” She set down her rolling pin and spun tightly in place. James was close – too close, truly, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him off. She tipped her head back, locking eyes with him as she asked, “And what, exactly, do you imagine she’s going to do to you?”

“More like what she wants me to do to _her_. She wants me to…er… _clean her floors_.”

Lily burst out laughing, standing still only through sheer force of will, lest some part of her brush against his skin.

“Was that supposed to be _sexy_?” she asked.

“I felt I was really building up to something there, but my train of thought ran out of track and derailed into mundane tasks.”

“And there you were, boasting about your creativity not one day ago.”

“It’s your bloody fault. I can hardly keep still when you’re that close to me, much less lay out new and innovative track for my thoughts.”

“Well, then, let me provide some track right now.”

Her hand scrambled behind her for a piece of clingfilm—she’d really have to figure out a way to keep some in her pocket without it getting stuck together—and then paused, her whole body stilling at the sound of someone pounding on the front door.

James leapt back from her, cursing. “It’s Sirius.”

Lily smoothed the front of her apron and then patted her braid. They hadn’t done anything. She had nothing to be ashamed of.

Although they really did have to stop doing this in the shop. A broad archway kept the kitchen visible to the front windows. Anyone could see them.

“Go let him in,” Lily said with a wave at the door.

“See, now with this distance between us,” James said as he walked into the dining room, “I’m already coming up with more appropriate lines. Why didn’t I use something about polishing? That might’ve worked.”

“Only if I used it,” she called back.

“Shit, right.”

The bell jangled as Sirius’s heavy footsteps marched in.

“I thought you’d know the back door was open this time of day,” James told him.

“I do know, but I also had the good sense to check through the windows to make sure you two weren’t doing anything I didn’t want to walk in on. And look, I was right. One of the few times in my life I wish I hadn’t been. I eat the pie that comes out of the kitchen.”

“Come on back, Sirius,” Lily shouted, in the possibly futile hopes of diffusing any tension between the two most important people in her life.

“For your information, Sirius,” James said smugly, “I was just in the middle of ruining the mood.”

“You said that with entirely too much pride and not nearly enough contrition.”

“Then you ruined it for good,” James added, following Sirius into the kitchen.

“Good.”

As a course of habit, Sirius rarely looked terribly pleased with the world – he was not prone to idle smiling or joyous looks, instead preferring a cool, often superior nonchalance. But this morning there was a particularly displeased set to his mouth, a newspaper tucked tightly under one arm.

“What’s wrong?” Lily asked.

“What’s wrong, Lily, is that I did some terrific sleuthing last night and you both will think that I just read it in the paper. All that work and I could’ve waited another twelve hours for it to become official.”

“I’m happy to give credit where credit is due. How much do I owe you?”

“You tell me.” Sirius dropped the paper onto the counter, allowing Lily and James to read one of the headlines.

_PEVERELL PURCHASES POTTER & POTTER_

James darted in for a closer look, hands planting on either side of the paper, eyes flying over the print.

“ _No,_ ” he said. “They _wouldn’t_. They wouldn’t sell to Riddle!”

Lily stepped forward, her hand reaching for James’s shoulder for the half-second it took her to remember to stop.

“They did,” said Sirius, crossing his arms. “And I’m too out of the loop on this case to make heads, tails, sandcastles, or whatever else you want out of this. So you two start talking.”

Lily didn’t answer at once, her fingers clenching around the rolling pin – James looked like he’d sick up, and she couldn’t offer any comfort, and it _wasn’t fair_.

“James,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

He didn’t seem to have heard, but Sirius cleared his throat expectantly.

She’d long ago learned Sirius’s moods and the appropriate responses to them, but now she had two boys to manage, and she knew nothing of James’s current preferences. Did he want to be coddled, or left alone? Did he want to talk about it, or pretend it had never happened?

She could only guess at James’s needs, but at least she could address Sirius’s.

“Another sorry for you, Sirius,” she said. “It’s easy for me and James to keep each other up to date since we’re, er—”

“Canoodling, fornicating, whatever word you want to use—”

“I was actually deciding between living together and dating—”

“It doesn’t matter. I need you two to tell me everything.”

There was conversation to be had, but also a shop to run. Lily continued making her pies and told Sirius everything, while James simultaneously made himself useful and worked out his rage by taking chairs off of tables in the dining room and slamming them into place on the ground.

If it helped James, Lily was more than willing to endure the damage to her shop. Chairs and booths could be replaced. James’s company could not.

“So you two suspected Riddle’s involvement?” Sirius asked, back against the doorframe between the kitchen and dining room. “Again, the loop, I feel outside of it.”

“It’s not like we were hiding it from you,” Lily said, her hands peeling peaches of their own accord. “We only put it together last night. The loop still includes you.”

A particularly loud crash of chair legs on linoleum had Lily putting down her paring knife. Her pies could wait, albeit not for long.

She pried off her plastic gloves and crossed into the dining room, grabbing Sirius on the way.

As they approached, James kicked at one of the table legs, and then hopped back with a howl. “Fuck. _Fuck_! They sold my fucking company!”

“Yes,” Sirius drawled. “I gathered. But why does Riddle want your bleeding company in the first place?”

“He wanted my division,” James said bitterly, dropping into a chair and massaging his foot. “Research and Development.”

Lily occupied the chair across from James, and Sirius the one next to her.

“What’s so great about your former division that he’d kill you for it?” Sirius asked.

“He wants us because we’re the best,” James said, hanging his head in his hands, fingers tightening in his hair. “Starting a successful research unit takes money and experienced staff and time. It’s much quicker for him to buy us out than start up his own. He’s made lots of acquisitions that way.”

“He’d tried to buy you out before – what stopped him then?”

“All the board members knew I hated Riddle, and enough of them cared about that to veto the acquisition. But now that I’m dead….”

Lily sat on her hands to keep them from reaching out to James.

“Well,” Sirius said, “at least now we know why you were murdered.”

While she shot Sirius a warning glance, James crumpled forward, his arms cradling his head on the table.

Sirius made a show of looking the other direction.

“James,” she said, “it’s—”

The phrases _going to be all right_ and _not your fault_ both leapt to mind, but the first was not necessarily true, the second a salve for a different type of wound.

“It’s okay to be upset,” she finished. “I’d be your comforter right now and wrap you in goose-down goodness if I could, but I don’t have one on me, so all I can say is I’m sorry. Is there anything we can do?”

His face still squashed into his arms, James shook his head.

An ache crept into Lily’s chest.

“The best thing we can do,” Sirius said to Lily, “is catch the bloke who killed Potter, and if that happens to be the same person who killed Podmore, all the better. Hello, birds, meet this stone.”

Verbal sympathy seemed to do nothing for James, and she couldn’t offer anything by way of physical affection…. Perhaps catching his killer truly was the best comfort she could offer.

“We don’t know for sure Riddle killed Podmore or James,” Lily said, pushing her hair off her forehead with both palms. “All we _suspect_ is that he wanted Podmore’s research, badly enough to kill him or have someone else do it. He was so eager to get it going that he didn’t even wait until the acquisition went through to put Severus on the project.”

“You’re right – Riddle’s an established figure, can’t be seen getting his hands too dirty. A man at that level, he’s probably got somebody doing it for him.”

“Podmore said Voldemort killed him, not Riddle. Someone else has to be involved.”

“True enough, and I think I know who it is. Your mate,” Sirius said, looking now to James, “the one who was at your flat for the match—”

“Peter didn’t kill me,” James said, his voice muffled by his arms. “He wouldn’t.”

“Pettigrew, right?” Sirius said, and jerked his head back toward the kitchen. “You might be interested in the inside fold of the paper, where they announce Peter Pettigrew as your successor.”

James shot upright, his eyes immediately finding where the paper lay in the distance. “They wouldn’t. He can’t—Peter isn’t—”

“Capable of killing you so Riddle will promote him? Why not? Sounds like motive to me.”

“Peter is my friend!”

“Peter messed with your window so he or someone else could sneak in and poison you. Show me where murder and abetting are in the definition of friendship because I’m sure as hell not using that dictionary anymore.”

Lily rammed her elbow into Sirius’s side, eliciting a muttered curse and a slide of Sirius’s chair away from hers.

As much as she would have preferred to offer platitudes, the promotion of Peter Pettigrew was rather damning.

“Is there any way,” she asked, “that Peter earned that promotion?”

James’s hand tore through his hair. “I—I mean, he’s a good bloke, but—I dunno, maybe, I guess—”

“That’s the scenic route to the city of _hell no_ ,” Sirius said, “which means he traded something with Riddle to get personally picked. Riddle wouldn’t have put him in charge of the division he wants most if he didn’t already know the bloke, right?”

“No, he—”

“So either someone inside the company put in a good word for Pettigrew—unlikely from the sound of it—or Riddle knew him and trusted him. And nothing builds trust like murdering together.”

“NO!” James bolted to his feet, his chair nearly toppling over behind him. “Peter didn’t kill me. He _didn’t_. There’s another explanation.”

“Then type it up in a memo and—ah!” Sirius glared at Lily, who’d kicked him in the shin.

This had clearly devolved into a personal vendetta. Unfortunately, Sirius’s skewed motives did not prevent him from being right.

“James,” Lily pleaded. “At least consider it. Last night we discussed opportunity – and this _is_ a plausible motive….”

“He _wouldn’t_ , all right? I _know_ him.”

James marched to the front door and yanked on it, only to discover it was still locked, and let out a strangled, frustrated noise. He turned the lock, threw the door open, and disappeared onto the street, the bell frenzied in his wake.

Lily thwacked Sirius’s shoulder. “You’re a right prick.”

“The man needs to face the truth.”

“Face the truth, not have his whole head submerged into a bucket of it.”

“Pity only makes it worse.”

“It’s not pity, it’s empathy—”

“Either way, I don’t have time to make people feel good about finding out their friends killed them.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sirius. You _do_ have time, you just don’t like James because you think I can’t be mates with you if I’m with him, but for the last time, I can manage the incredible balancing act of having a friend and a boyfriend at the same time.”

Without bothering to look at Sirius for a reaction, Lily pushed back from the table and headed for the door. Then she stopped, jerked back by the invisible, persistent tether of entrepreneurship.

“ _Shit_.” She looked back to him and pointed at the door. “Go after him and apologize for trying to drown him with the truth. He needs comforting, too, while you’re at it, and I can’t go because I have to get the shop ready to open.”

Sirius looked mutinous for a moment.

“Are you my friend?” Lily asked. “Because I’m not in the habit of keeping ones that are consistently rude to other important people in my life. Make up your mind right now so I don’t waste another moment on you.”

Sirius studied the floor, but soon made for the exit. “We’re friends,” he muttered without looking at her.

“Good.” Lily folded her arms. “Now go, and don’t you dare make him feel any worse.”

\--

Up on the roof of Lily’s building, James perched on the ledge, London spread out around him, bees buzzing in the air and his cat resting in his lap. A layer of flat clouds hung overhead, a blanket dampening the sun, the city dull and grey beneath it.

After his escape from The Pie Hole, James had discovered Algernon waiting for him down the block. He’d snatched his cat into his arms and stood there on the pavement, his eyes squeezed shut, Algernon’s skittering heartbeat a welcome, familiar sensation against his chest. They'd agreed Algernon would wait a week before returning for another visit, but here he was, precisely when James needed him.

There'd been nowhere to run but the roof. His flat, his office, his aunt's, anywhere he thought of as his, were no longer places of refuge. He couldn't even go to his favorite park or pub, not without risking recognition.

Algernon rubbed his head against James's hand, purring, more content than James had seen him in months. James had probably been neglecting his cat prior to his death. Work had been a whirlwind lately – and would be worse now, only without James to steer the ship.

 _Peter_ would be navigating the political waters of the company now, no doubt taking direction from Riddle.

James's fingers scratched too hard against Algernon's fur, but like a good familiar, his cat forgave him for being in a sour mood.

Peter might have poisoned him. At the very least, it seemed, he’d helped someone else murder James.

Unfathomable. Absurd.

And yet.

Again with the _and yets_. James could have murdered the phrase and regretted nothing.

Clearly someone close to him had given the killer guidance on James’s flat and habits. And if Peter were willing to let someone in, there wasn't much of a moral leap to him personally adding the poison.

If only it had been Snape. Selfish, immoral, spiteful Snape he could see killing him, at least more than anyone else. But Peter? Self-conscious, moderately intelligent Peter?

"What do you think?" James asked Algernon. "Did Peter kill me?"

Algernon angled his head back to offer a morose expression.

For James, this served as the final nail in his actual coffin. If anyone besides the killer knew what had happened, it was Algernon. Truly, James should have solicited his input from the start.

"You didn't open the window, did you?” James sighed. “I was trying to give you credit, you know. You've been trying for months."

The tips of Algernon's ears twitched beneath his hand.

"You'd have got there eventually, I know."

Normally such a concession would have had Algernon preening, but he only continued to look terribly sorry, and pressed his face against James’s palm in sympathy. His rough fur and damp nose, while a mild comfort, did little to ease the crushing tide sweeping through James.

He curled around Algernon, his eyes threatening tears.

The door to the roof creaked open behind him.

“You really should look after your shop,” James said, his words clipped and his throat taut.

“Haven’t got a shop,” answered Sirius, “and if I did you can bet your arse I wouldn’t be the one actually running it day in, day out. More of the delegating managerial type, me.”

James found breathing a little easier now, more than he would have if Lily had come to find him. As harshly as Sirius had bludgeoned him with the truth, causing bruises that James had barely begun to examine, there was the indisputable fact that James would never allow Sirius to see him cry.

“Except for your investigating,” James said. “You do that yourself.”

“Don’t trust other people to investigate, except Lily. Selling baked goods to strangers? Any idiot can do that.”

As James batted away a bee on Algernon’s head, Sirius’s footsteps crunched over the light layer of gravel covering the roof. He settled himself next to James, his back to the skyline.

“What’re you here for?” James asked. “Going to finish it and push me off the roof?”

“If I did kill you, it’d never be in as incriminating a circumstance as this.”

“Poison your game, too?”

“Not quite,” Sirius allowed, a strange, dark smile briefly crossing his face.

James shook his head. “I’d understand, a little, if you did kill me. More than I understand why I was actually killed. Jealousy, I get.”

“I’m not _jealous_ ,” Sirius snapped.

“Of course you aren’t.”

Even Algernon managed a sardonic look at Sirius, who glared back at him.

“This your hyperintelligent beast, then?” Sirius asked. “I didn’t know Lily’d let you take him in.”

“She hasn’t.”

Sirius shoved his hands in the pockets of his leather coat, giving James a view of his knitted gun holster once more. Whatever James had thought of him initially, there were some curious depths to Sirius Black.

“Are you expecting me to side with you and not tell her?” Sirius asked.

“I’m not expecting anything from you. You’re not a friend, but apparently I can’t even trust those anymore.”

“Is that what you ran off to do? Get your remaining friend, come up to the roof, and throw yourself a pity party? If you did, you did a shit job decorating. And there isn’t even any cake.”

“You’re right, my friend might’ve actually poisoned me, I should be totally cool and unemotional.” James ran a hand along Algernon’s back, attempting to smooth the fur and failing. “So you’re not here to kill me, just to take the mickey. Cheers.”

“I came to make sure you don’t run off with any wild ideas.”

“First off, if I did run, you wouldn’t catch me, I’m dead fast. Second, I love a good wild idea, but did you really think I’d risk Lily’s life to go, I dunno, punch Peter in the face?”

Sirius side-eyed him. “Or worse.”

“I—you think I’d try to go _kill_ him?”

“It’s what I’d do.”

Algernon’s chest rumbled with a purr, to which Sirius nodded in apparent thanks for the support.

James regarded Sirius for a moment. If it had been Lily, he might not have admitted to it, but Sirius….

“Maybe I mused on the idea of setting him on fire,” he said, “maybe for a second, but it doesn’t mean I really want to set him on fire.”

Sirius’s mouth slanted into a knife of a smile. “That second can be a lot of fun.”

James caught himself on the verge of smiling back, and then recalled what Sirius had done earlier.

“Figuratively speaking,” James said, “someone should set you on fire for throwing me under the bus when you told me Peter did me in.”

“That was the truth bus. He killed you, at least in part.”

“That wasn’t the truth bus, it was the salt in the wound crosstown express.”

“I’d hire you to do more than sell baked goods in my hypothetical shop – you’re no idiot. You know he did it.”

“Yeah,” James said, eyes averted. “Yeah, it’s pretty clear…but you didn’t have to be such a prick about it.”

“I ripped off the plaster.” Sirius ducked his chin, strands of hair falling elegantly forward to frame his face. “But maybe with more force than it needed.”

James’s hands stilled on Algernon, but he managed not to stare at Sirius.

It was not a full apology, and therefore it didn’t warrant full forgiveness, but that did not mean James had no part to play here.

“I’m not a ripper,” James said. “I pull up a corner a little bit at a time. I run it under warm water, then I pull it up a little more. It’s a process. But I guess…I guess sometimes that’s not the best approach.”

“Sometimes it’s better to rip.”

Algernon gave a small meow of agreement.

James scowled. “ _Traitor._ ”

Sirius surveyed Algernon with interest. “Maybe your cat isn’t all that thick.”

As far as James was concerned, this was all but a declaration of truce, and he was not about to set fire to the extended branch.

For his part, Algernon’s expression turned haughty, but a particular shade that James knew how to remedy.

“He’s brilliant.” James resumed scratching behind Algernon’s ears, and was rewarded by a faint purr. “For the record, he found his own way here. I didn’t invite him today.”

“Today?”

“You’re no slouch either, I see.”

“I’d have to be blind to miss that one – it was lobbed right at my face.”

“Well, maybe I lobbed it that way because you don’t seem to be running straight off to Lily to tell her he’s here.”

Sirius looked away, shoulders hunched. After a moment, he said, “I think a man’s entitled to a few secrets of his own.” He turned back to James. “And it’s a bloody cat, it’s not like he’s about to up and ruin us all.”

James’s hands covered Algernon’s ears as he hissed, “Don’t even tempt him.”

Sirius barked a laugh and crossed his legs at the ankle, while Algernon squirmed in James’s lap.

An accord with Sirius was certainly welcome, but it could not fully alleviate the heavy weight pressing on James’s chest. The words _Peter killed you_ kept flitting through his mind, unwelcome but certainly not untrue, each time bringing with them a fresh bout of despair.

“Well, you can consider your mission accomplished,” James said. “There will be absolutely no running off with wild ideas, tamed ideas, or even run of the mill ideas. My intentions are to sit here, petting my cat and indulging myself in well-earned pity.”

“While I love accomplishing missions,” Sirius said, “I admit I had an ulterior motive. I just wasn’t sure if you’d be in the mood to discuss it.”

“And what kind of mood would I need to be in to discuss said topic? If it’s not depressed and morose, I’m not sure I can help you. Normally I like to be able to offer an array of choices, but you understand the circumstances are really constraining my range.”

“You need to be in the kind of mood where you want revenge. And despite your second of arsonist tendencies, you don’t seem to be there.”

Naturally, Algernon’s head perked up at the word revenge, his small, feline mouth nearly smiling. James placed a palm on top of his head to calm him.

“You want to help _me_ get revenge.”                              

“If you really want, yeah, I can help with that. But you strike me more as the fair and balanced justice type.”

James’s childhood vision of becoming a copper reared its righteous head. Supporting the law had been the goal for so long. The apparent lack of police progress on his case should have sullied his views, but James couldn’t seem to muster the requisite bloodthirstiness to go against those long-abandoned dreams.

He gave a tight smile. “Arson plans are tabled, then. What’s on the menu for justice?”

“You tell me,” Sirius said, climbing to his feet to take up a casual pacing. “We’ve got no evidence to prove Pettigrew so much as lifted a pinky to help a murderer, much less that he did it himself, and no proof Riddle did anything other than buy out your company.”

“S’pose the court wouldn’t accept a sworn statement backdated from me several weeks ago detailing how they were going to kill me.”

Sirius flashed a look at him mid-pace, amused. “Haven’t tried that one before but your instincts are dead on. No, the best angle we’ve got is flipping Pettigrew, fast enough that he doesn’t see heads or tails coming.”

“Is justice heads or tails?”

“Justice is shoving the damn quarter down his throat.”

James found himself laughing, low and dark, while Algernon rumbled happily in his lap. “What’s the easiest way to get him to turn on Riddle, then?”

“Terror’s a good motivator. So’s guilt. Guilt’ll get a man down to the police station with his trousers half-on.”

“Speaking from experience, I hope.”

“Oh,” Sirius said with relish, “I definitely am. Question is, does Pettigrew feel any guilt over killing you?”

James hugged Algernon closer. Algernon, thankfully, did not object.

Those hours of drinks at the pub, matches at James’s flat, and jokes at work had not been enough to tip James off to the deep vein of betrayal hidden in Peter Pettigrew. And yet—for once, the _and yet_ landed in his favor—they surely hadn’t been for naught.

“I—I want to say yes,” he said, “because, you know, we were mates, but I guess I didn’t know him at all. But that said…yeah. I think…I hope he must feel at least a little guilty.”

“All we need is a spark and some kindling.”

“Kindling’s there, I think. So for a spark…what, you and Lily go lay on the guilt?”

“If the cops didn’t catch any guilt—and you didn’t either, not before you died—I doubt it’ll work. He’s got that much stamina, at least. Strangers working him over won’t do it.” Sirius paused in his tracks and faced James. “What about that assistant of yours? Could he manage to put the pressure on?”

James attempted to picture Remus in the role of star interrogator. He certainly wasn’t outwardly harsh, but James had seen flashes of the iron concealed by oversized jumpers and threadbare trousers. There was, however, another problem.

“I think he could manage if needed,” he said, “but he doesn’t know about Peter leaving the window unlocked, and you can’t exactly tell him how you learned about it.”

Algernon voiced his displeasure, and James sighed.

“Remus is a mate,” he went on. “To me and to Peter. It’d take more than suspecting Peter walked the wrong way to the pub to really get him going, and he wouldn’t want to suspect. He doesn’t now, obviously. He wouldn’t turn on Peter like that, not without more evidence, and we can’t give it to him.”

Moments of silence passed as they both considered various approaches, Sirius making the rounds on the gravel, James still in place with his cat. But despite James’s best efforts, no plan came to mind, his thoughts stymied at every turn. No angle could be worked, not without revealing the truth of James’s renewed life.

“It’s hopeless, isn’t it?” James said. “He’s going to get away with it.”

Algernon growled, but notably did not offer a plan of his own.

Sirius stared at the ground, his hands in his pockets. “Pettigrew should have died,” he said, “rather than betray you.”

He looked up to lock eyes with James.

There was a moment early on after meeting certain individuals—very few, in James’s experience—where the other person indicated, in some small way, a core connection to James’s most deeply held thoughts and beliefs. Like fireflies winking at each other in the dark of night, Sirius’s comment served as a signal that in at least one regard, he and Sirius were of the same breed.

This flash of hope sparked the mischievous corner of James’s mind.

How fortunate, he thought, that he in turn knew Peter Pettigrew’s life and routine.

“It sounds to me,” James said slowly, “like we need a wild idea.”

“Funny enough,” Sirius said, a smile tugging on the edge of his mouth, “I get the feeling you’re the man to talk to.”

\--

Doubt about his wild idea didn’t settle in when James explained it to Lily, when he was purchasing supplies, or even when Sirius picked the lock to Peter’s flat in the middle of the night. It seemed the perfect plan for both his own emotional needs and the practical needs of the case.

It wasn’t until later, when he stood silent next to Peter’s bed, covered in flour, white face paint, and white temporary hair dye, that tendrils of misgiving began to creep in. His heart pounded furiously, his palms grew slick with sweat.

Seeing Peter like this—curled up on his side, arms stretched around an oversized pillow, his face lacking any of the lines of tension James would have hoped to see in the face of a betrayer—incited no venom in James. The righteous wrath he’d believed would arrive with him appeared to have taken a wrong turn and got lost along the way.

How could he have contemplated setting Peter on fire? He couldn’t even stand here and confront him, an opportunity nearly any murder victim would have killed for—

And maybe most people would have gone for the kill in this position. It would be easy to do, if he so chose. Take his hands and wrap them around Peter’s moonlit neck and hold on until he stilled.

But Sirius had been correct – there was nothing like murderous tendencies in James, not even for the friend who had killed him.

Leaving the flat now would mean Peter would get away with it. Riddle would get away with it, too, and take James’s company to boot. But this….

He could not.

He turned back to the door, took a step, and tripped over a pile of laundry he’d forgotten was there, careening forward and cursing loudly.

James caught his balance.

Peter woke up.

James spun back to face Peter, who’d bolted upright in bed. There was no alternative now – no other way forward without exposing Lily’s secret, no path but the one at his feet.

“ _Peeeeterrrr_ ,” James said, pitching his voice low and, he hoped, ethereal. “ _Peeeeeeterrrrrrrr._ ”

Peter clutched his pillow to his chest. “J-James?”

James had not considered at all what to do with his hands. He half-raised them, debating the merits of a ghost-like finger wave, and let them fall again. Being still could be plenty eerie on its own.

“Youuuuu killlled me, Peterrrr.”

“I’m sorry!” Peter squeaked. “I had to!”

James’s hand absently came up to scratch his nose, and in the process he inhaled a sprinkling of flour, leading to a brief bout of coughing.

Peter clamped a hand over his mouth, as though James’s ghost germs were going to infect him.

“Oh, fuck you, Peter,” James said, crossing his arms. “Death isn’t catching. And fuck you again because I doubt you had a fucking gun to your head.”

“Riddle said he’d kill me if I didn’t kill you, and he _would_ , James, I know he would, I saw him kill someone else!”

There was abject terror there, written into his pleading eyes and twisted mouth.

And yet….

“That was it?” James asked. “That was enough?”

“I’m _sorry_.”

There was a particular wrenching pain to his delivery, a hint of a sob tucked within it, that ignited something else within James. It would have been easier, he realized, if Peter had not felt sorry at all. James could have understood sublimated jealousy, or harbored resentment, or anything other than genuine remorse.

Sorry meant he’d still cared about James.

Sorry meant he’d done it anyway.

Any reluctance James had harbored evaporated, swiftly consumed by the blazing sweep of anger that rushed through him. He nearly slammed a fist against the wall, but remembered that he was, for the moment, pretending to be incorporeal.

His clenched hands stayed at his sides, his arms trembling with restraint. “Fuck your apology, Peter,” he said, “and fuck you. You fucking _killed_ me.”

“I didn’t want to, you should’ve seen how he strangled Podmore—”

“Oh, I _saw_ Podmore. Believe me. We had a lot to talk about. Namely how we were going to haunt you for the rest of your miserable life for not turning Riddle in immediately.”

“ _No_.”

“ _Yes_ ,” James said, taking a deliberate step forward. “We absolutely will. We will be back every damn night if we have to. You had your shot to come clean, and instead you hid like a _coward_.”

“I can’t turn on Voldemort, James, he’s too powerful, I _can’t_ —”

“You _will_.”

The face paint itched something awful, the flour still lingered in his nose, and the spray dye would ruin his hair for days, but it would be worth all that if Peter would only do the right thing.

James stepped forward again, towering over Peter, a few mere feet between them. “You are going to get up right now and go to the fucking police station and tell them what you know and what you did.” At Peter’s meek expression, James added, “ _NOW!_ ”

Peter clambered out of the far side of the bed, clad only in a pair of plain y-fronts, and shoved his feet into slippers.

“Can I at least get my dressing gown?” he asked, quivering, hands wrapped around his pale chest.

In James’s opinion, karma dictated that Peter Pettigrew should be drawn and quartered in the nude, crucified au naturel, or paraded in the buff before an angry mob, perhaps one armed with rotten fruit.

But when James tried to get his mouth to wrap around the word _no,_ it would not move, his tongue lying quiescent in its place.

Once more, he could not.

He found himself settling for mercy, and hating himself for it.

“Yes,” he bit out. “Get the gown and go. Then you’ll never have to see me again.”

Peter nodded frantically and snatched his gown off a hook on the wall. James did not watch him don it, suddenly preoccupied by his new shoelaces, brilliant white in the light of the moon. Fury’s reign had ended, but it still smoldered, its smoky traces filling James’s chest to the brim.

He listened as Peter shuffled toward the living room, his breaths wheezed and panicked. His steps paused at the door, and James glanced up to find Peter wearing his robe and an agonized expression, looking over his shoulder at James.

“I am sorry.”

Whatever mercy James had unearthed, though, was not enough to add up to forgiveness. James simply stared at him, his throat full of anything but words, and after a moment Peter averted his eyes.

He left, and James stayed, ribbons of moonlight through the blinds his only companions.

\--

Without conscious thought, James’s feet carried him away, an untethered, intangible being floating out of the flat, down two flights of stairs, and into the chill night air. He glided down the few steps to Lily’s car, which glinted under pale yellow streetlights, its engine rumbling.

Lily asked him something as he crawled into the back seat, although later he could not recall the exact question. He did remember saying nothing in response, just lying down to rest his head on cool leather, removing his glasses, and massaging his palms over his eyes. He managed to take in that Sirius was following Peter to the station, but that was irrelevant, planned. It did not seem to matter.

By now, any anger had bled out of James, leaving him hollow, like someone had stretched skin over a thin wire frame.

The drive home was him sliding around on the seat as they turned, streetlights flashing gold into the car in metronomic beats, and Lily turning to check on him periodically.

He did not look back at her.

Somehow James made the journey from the car to the flat to the bathtub with very little prodding. The water turned cloudy and grey around him as he scraped off the trappings of his costume, paint flakes floating on the surface around him. Eventually Lily, equipped with her gloves and several thick towels, pulled him out and tucked him into bed.

Sleep remained elusive, always ducking behind doors when James came calling. He still lay awake on his back when Lily’s alarm buzzed, in the same pitch as her bees.

The morning news played out while he poked at a bowl of cereal, listening to the reporter report on the truth of James’s death.

The facts were these: Tom Marvolo Riddle, aka Voldemort, had one lifelong, fervent desire – to avoid death. Fearing the prospect of the end of his existence, he’d spent countless hours and dollars funding scientific research that would keep him alive forever.

Renowned scientist Sturgis Podmore had discovered the potential for life-prolonging effects in a rare Peruvian vine, and Tom Riddle had become obsessed. He’d offered to fund Podmore’s research, provided Podmore shared it with Riddle’s scientists, including one Severus Snape. When Podmore refused, finding Riddle an overbearing and terrifying presence, Riddle strangled him using the vines that Riddle hoped would save his own life.

Research and vines in hand, Riddle escaped from the scene. The only witness: Peter Pettigrew, whom Riddle had forced to come along with the intention of thoroughly terrifying him. After all, Riddle thought, he could acquire the vines, but he lacked the facilities for immediate research. The quickest solution was to kill James Potter, the lone barrier to acquiring a first-class research division.

Peter Pettigrew had proved the critical link.

Watching Riddle’s dark head ducked into the back of a police car should have inspired fireworks in James. There sat the orchestrator of his death, cuffed and confined, ready to be held without bail. Speculation from the pundits held that the acquisition of Potter & Potter would undoubtedly be canceled.

And still James stood in the kitchen doorway, detached.

He did not follow Lily to The Pie Hole that day. The sofa proved too tempting an offer, the mind-numbing simplicity of daytime television an excellent prophylactic against thought.

Lily came home that evening with Chinese takeaway, three-plum pie, and her beekeeping suit. The food they consumed in the kitchen, Lily chattering about her day with little input from James. The bee suit she shimmied into after, then curled up on the sofa with James, methodically threading her fingers through his hair.

James knew he should have been enthralled by the suit and the potential it bore, but someone had installed a drain in him, and any emotion that dared materialize got sucked away at once, swirling down faster and faster until it vanished altogether.

The next day repeated the formula of the first, the only difference the headline on the morning news, which had already moved on from James’s murder. After curry for dinner, Lily forced him to take another bath and remove the lingering traces of paint and dye that clung to him.

The third day James thought the sofa might have conformed to the shape of his spine, but any feelings about that disappeared down the drain. The only sentiment that didn’t seem to be devoured was a longing for his cat, and even that was mild and weak, a vague thought that kept cropping up only during commercial breaks.

Lily did not return with takeaway or pie that evening. Instead she made him rinse off in the shower, brushed his hair with gloved hands, and dragged him to a café for sandwiches.

“You’ve had three days,” she said. “I’ve my sofa to think of. It needs a break.”

“I think it misses me,” James said, staring out the window at pedestrians passing beneath a brilliant orange sky. “It calls to me.”

“It’s too short for you.”

“I like to think I’m not so petty as to care about size.”

He was nearly pleased by his own wit, but could not muster the energy to look back at Lily for her reaction.

They took the scenic route back at her insistence, stopping to peer in shop windows and to admire early summer flowers blooming in a park. Or at least Lily did, while James hovered at her side, dreaming of the sofa.

When they reached her building, she guided him up to the rooftop to stand beneath a mostly dark sky, the city lights too powerful an enemy for the stars.

“What do you want up here?” he asked, idly inspecting one of the beehives, hands shoved in his jeans pockets and shoulders hunched against the cold. “It’s cold.”

“It is,” she agreed.

He looked back to find her next to the door, shucking her trench coat to leave her arms bare in a sleeveless green dress. She folded the coat, laid it on the ground, and planted her feet.

“Er,” he said.

“We’re not going back in until you start talking.”

“Ah, right. And removing your coat…d’you want me to talk dirty? Because I like to think I’ve got a wonderful tongue on me in a lot of senses, but I’m not really in the mood right now.”

“I’m wasn’t thinking about the silver nature of your tongue so as much as thinking that if I stood here with bare skin exposed, then you couldn’t touch me and force your way back inside.”

This, James thought, did not bode well at all.

“Can’t I go back to the sofa?” he said. “I like your sofa. It likes me. I’m considering buying it a ring any day now—”

“I’m a monogamist – there’ll be no wedding the housewares,” she said, firmly but not unkindly. “You’ve had your time to mope. Now it’s over.”

“I’m not ready to stop moping.”

“How long will it take, then?”

“I dunno, I can’t—I don’t—it’s not like I can send a save the date about it, all right?”

“It’s time, James. I didn’t bring you back to life so you could fuse with my furniture.”

He took a few strides away from her, then stopped, his hand coming up in a sharp, frustrated gesture. “I _can’t_.”

Her patience and her kindness held. “Why not?”

“ _Because_ ,” he told the gravel on the rooftop.

“Because?”

“Because—because it’s awful, all right?”

“What’s awful?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “I dunno, everything.”

“Everything’s awful.”

“Yes. No. You’re not awful. It’s just—I can’t—” He tried to swallow them down, keep them in place, but all the things that had disappeared into the drain came shooting back up in an awful, sour heave. “I _died_ , Lily. Peter _killed_ me.”

“I know,” she said. “He’s a bastard.”

“He turned on me for basically nothing—nothing good, nothing reasonable—and he was my _friend_ and he _killed_ me!” James said, throwing a vicious kick at the gravel, rocks flying in a satisfying spray across the roof.

“The worst sort of bastard. Seventh level for him for sure.”

“I thought I’d feel better if he confessed but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t, because I’ve still got nothing. My family and my friends and my job are all gone and I’ve got nothing.”

His lungs struggled to keep an even pace, his breaths coming out ragged.

After a moment, Lily said, “You’ve got me.”

He still had not looked at her, not during any of this, could not endure her compassion face-to-face.

“No, yeah, I know I do, but that’s—that’s not enough. You’re brilliant, but you can’t be my entire life, you know?”

“If you got the headline that I wanted to be your entire life, you picked up the wrong paper. Obviously you need more. Just tell me what you want.”

He stood still, back straight but chin ducked. He felt his next sentence should have come out as a roar, but instead it was a plea, desperate and quiet.

“I want my life back.”

James scuffed his shoe against the gravel while a car alarm wailed unhappily in the distance. There’d been a particularly annoying one near his flat, triggered by someone so much as sneezing near it, and James had given much thought to stealing the car and driving it into the Thames. Even Remus and Peter had known the intricacies of its screeching, and sometimes they all yowled along with it, when the alarm became particularly unbearable and there was nothing to do but join in.

There would be no more of that, now.

Quietly, Lily asked, “Were you even happy?”

He curled further in on himself, arms folded. “I was—I dunno—I was okay, I guess, and no one’s perfectly happy, and anyway it was a life. It was my life.”

“This one is yours, too.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No, but would you want the same life? You get to spin the wheel of life, draw another card, start over.”

“I don’t want to start over.”

“I know, and you should’ve been able to choose but you weren’t and I’m sorry.”

He could start from scratch, but death boxed him on all sides: it limited who he could see, where he could go, what he could do.

It seemed impossible to live life like that.

“Only I think of you when we were kids,” Lily said, “and you were going to travel the world and buy a motorbike and adopt ten more cats—”

“I also wanted to grow up to be a frog. Things changed. Life happened.” He turned back to her at last. “You didn’t become an astronaut.”

She hadn’t moved, as best he could tell, just stood solid on the ground, goose pimples dotting her arms, one corner of her mouth lifted.

“No,” she said. “Life happened. Finding out you can wake the dead can kind of complicate things.”

Of course. Lily could hardly place herself in such a scientific, monitored position, not without risking exposure. She only had to accidentally touch one piece of moldy fruit to reveal everything she’d sought to conceal.

How many paths had been closed to her because of her unwanted, irrepressible ability?

Like him, she was trapped in place by death. She couldn’t pursue any job she liked. She couldn’t have dozens of close friends. She probably didn’t even feel like she could have biological kids, lest she pass on her ability.

But despite everything life and death had done to her in turn, she’d built a life of her own. She had a shop and friends and a P.I. job that helped victims find justice.

She did not have everything she might have liked, but she had something.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“I’m thinking,” he said slowly, “that I’m not the only one who’s been cursed by a witch.”

That shocked a small smile out of her. “Being cursed isn’t so bad.”

“I dunno. Life happened to you pretty awful.”

“Life happened,” she said, “but it’s still happening, too. And if you want to do the childhood dreams thing or ditch them and start some new ones, it doesn’t matter. I just want you to be happy.”

“You too,” he said. “I mean, I want—I don’t know what you want, it’s probably nothing evil, but I want you to get it. Have it. Eat it, if that’s the relevant verb.”

Her head tilted back as she laughed, hair swishing around, the lone rooftop light turning her skin a delicate shade of gold.

That was at least one thing on his new list of wants: to inspire that laugh, as often and as loudly as possible. He did not imagine he’d tire of it, an image he could endlessly devour.

There she stood, laughing and shivering, all because she’d made him come up here tonight. She’d known what he’d needed. She’d planned this, even knowing she’d have to endure his stubbornness and the cold.

“Put your coat on, would you?” he muttered, his cheeks growing warm. “Human shield, honestly. Dramatic much?”

“This from the man who recently imitated a ghost.”

“I never said I didn’t care for dramatics.”

She bent down to grab her coat. “Like you made yourself so approachable and open to—well.”

“Yeah, no, I know,” he said, one hand coming up to clasp the back of his neck. “I just…got lost.”

“Typical,” she said, arms slipping into her sleeves. “You always got lost in the woods.”

“I was never _lost_ , thank you. I would get turned around, is all.”

“I had to come rescue you on at least five separate occasions.”

He watched her pull on her winter gloves. “Well, you saved me again. For good.”

She closed the gap between them in a few neat steps and reached out to take his hand. “You can always ask for directions, all right? You don’t have to figure it out yourself, if you don’t want to.”

“I know,” he said, “I didn’t think about it, I was just…being lost.”

“Well, lucky for you I’m an excellent navigator.” She squeezed his hand. “Although I’m really glad the roof worked. I had no idea what you’d like.”

“You mean you don’t know me perfectly after only one week?”

“I need two weeks, tops.”

She would not be the entirety of his life, but she could easily be the best thing in it. She was trying, really trying, and he’d have to, too.

Which meant he couldn’t continue to keep secrets from her. She said she wanted him to be happy. Surely she’d understand…. Surely she’d let him have this one thing when he hadn’t asked for anything at all….

“What you probably don’t know,” he said, “is that, er, Algernon’s been visiting me.”

“Oh, good.” She tucked her hands in her pockets and went to sit on the raised ledge running around the roof. “I’d’ve invited him to move in if I didn’t think your aunt needed him more, and if—well.”

“What?”

“Well, as long as we’re coming clean about things…haven’t you ever wondered how he’s lived so long?”

“You didn’t...no. You couldn’t—when did he—”

“I hadn’t figured it out yet, and he got hit by a car—”

“ _What_!”

“And I touched him and he woke up and he never touched me again. I thought he’d just been faking it or something until…later.”

“Unbelievable.” James joined her on the ledge. “I always thought he was just trying to outlive me, but he _died_? That hypocrite. Getting angry with me for dying on _him_.”

“He was keeping my secret for me. From me, even.”

Algernon had always tried his best to take care of James, and, at the time, Lily. His lie by omission had been well-intentioned. And given the option, Algernon would never fess up to something so ignominious as being hit by a car.

“I guess I can’t be angry with him for protecting you.” He snuck a glance at Lily, a breeze up the side of the building tickling the back of his neck. “So he can keep visiting, yeah?”

“He can come by whenever. He knows to avoid touching me.”

James looked down at his lap. “That…that helps. Having him.”

“Would it help too if—well. You wanted to be a policeman, but what about becoming a private investigator instead?”

“Oh. I dunno.” He envisioned himself with a magnifying glass and a cool, inquisitive cock to his eyebrow. “Actually, yeah, that could be fun. If Sirius will let me, that is.”

“I already talked to him about it.” She risked a nudge of her shoulder against his. “You’ve won him over.”

“Of course I did. I’m exceptionally winsome.”

“You arrogant toerag.”

“Just a little.”

London night air had nothing on the crisp, clean scent of his aunt’s garden under the stars. But now, sitting with Lily, the city managed to smell almost sweet.

“And,” she said. “And you can tell Minerva you’re alive, if you like.”

James’s face snapped toward her. “Seriously?”

“I think she’ll keep it a secret. We can visit her, and…and I was being selfish.”

He could have his aunt back. He could go home again, properly this time, sit in his chair and lie in his bed and kick at the oven when it went on the fritz. He could weed as much as he liked and banter with her and gorge himself on biscuits—

“And Remus?” he asked.

“I can’t imagine we’d be able to keep it from him for long.”

His aunt and his one real friend—it wasn’t everything he wanted back, but if he’d had to choose—

“Thanks,” he remembered to say. “I mean, that sounds really inadequate, word-wise, but thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. It should’ve been this way from the start.”

“Either way. This is…fantastic.” He sprung up from the ledge, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I’m going to be a P.I.,” he said, turning back to Lily. “I’m going to talk to my aunt. I’m going to—buy a motorbike.”

“Is that so?” she asked through a slow-burning smile.

“No, you’re going to buy it because I’m legally dead, but you take my point.”

She looked up at him, grinning, gorgeous, and generous, the cityscape blinking behind her.

He paused in his bouncing, his world momentarily shrunk down to the image she presented, poised and wondrous. “I’d kiss you right now if it wouldn’t kill me.”

“You’ll want to even more when I suggest that we pay Remus to help take care of your aunt.”

James had taken a half-step forward before he caught himself. He had a job and his cat and his aunt and now his mate would be all right—

“You are phenomenal,” he told her. “Brilliant. Amazing. D’you want a sonnet? No, don’t ask me for that, I’m rubbish at poetry. Best I could do is a haiku.”

“I was joking about the compliment quota.”

He could not kiss her, he could not touch her, but his words…those were safe. Those were his.

“Thank you,” he said. “For bringing me back to life, and, you know, everything.”

He’d hoped to rouse another smile with that, perhaps a cheeky comeback, but instead Lily looked pained.

“What?” he said. “I wasn’t taking the mickey—”

“No, it’s not you, it’s—I have to tell you something.”

She gestured for James to return to the ledge, and he did so, keeping a safe gap between them.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said, “but there was the case and your company and Peter—but I have to tell you now because I’d want to know, if I were you, so you should know.”

Cold dread returned to his stomach in full.

“Only there’s a price, you see, if I keep someone alive for more than sixty seconds….”

\--

The buildings of London crawled past James. Lily’s car was only one of thousands nearby, all of them lined up in ribbons and pulled slowly through winding city streets. He stared out his window at the myriad pedestrians of London, watched as they went about their lives, laughing, walking, shopping, striding. He’d rejoin their ranks soon enough, but first he had amends to make.

Lily had killed a man.

She’d killed a man for him.

A bad man, she’d assured him, a man who stole things off of dead people and sold them on the internet, but a man nonetheless. The minutes James had spent celebrating being alive hadn’t really been his to celebrate.

He had not slept.

He’d seen that Lily had changed. He’d known it for a fact, mused on it plenty, acknowledged her reckless impulses. Only he’d never have expected this from her, never anticipated she’d end up killing someone. The way she’d confessed to the crime, neither had she.

Even if James had wanted to make things right, had wanted to trade his life back for Fletcher’s, he’d been assured he could not. That was not how her ability worked, she’d informed him. There were no take-backs.

He’d responded that they had no choice, then, but to go pay their respects to Fletcher. Lily had agreed. She’d said she wanted to apologize, which did fit in with the Lily that James had thought he’d known.

She maneuvered the car into a spot in front of a garish building painted with red and white stripes. As they climbed out of the car, she did not second-guess James, did not ask if he truly wanted to do this. Instead she led him through an alley to the back of the building and punched a code into a door handle. A short trip through a dimly lit corridor brought them to a small office, where a black man in a lab coat sat lotioning his hands behind a desk.

“We’re here for Fletcher,” she said.

“Mm-hmm,” said the man, and held out one of his smooth hands.

She pressed some pounds into his palm and headed through a side door, James at her heels.

Rows of drawers lined a wide metal wall, the room tinged with teal light. Two stark metal tables occupied the center of the room, partnered with a steel cart topped with terrifying instruments. It smelled like harsh chemicals, and something else, undoubtedly death.

Lily walked along the wall, eyes skimming over labels, until she found the appropriate drawer and rolled it out.

James came to stand at her side.

This, then, was Mundungus Fletcher. Straggly hair, wide brows, a nose that had seen the worse end of more than one fight. He might have been ugly and he might have been a thief, but he hadn’t deserved to die.

Lily had tried to explain herself the night before, but James had had difficulty processing anything she’d said after announcing that Fletcher had died for James. She hadn’t tried to force James to talk, or to listen, or to do anything in particular, and James hadn’t. But now, with Fletcher stretched out in front of them, James could stand to hear her thoughts.

“Why did you do it?” he asked.

She did not stop looking at Fletcher. “I was…. I think back about it a lot. Obviously. And I think…I didn’t think.”

“But you knew it would happen.”

“I knew but I didn’t think. I had one thought and it was of you and it clogged me up so no other thoughts could get through, including the one telling me to touch you again.”

Then it had not been a malicious choice, nor a cavalier one. Any fool could see she appreciated the significance of her decision, could spot the burden she’d placed on herself. She wasn’t taking it lightly, wasn’t pretending she’d been justified. She’d been reckless, exceptionally so, but not without a purpose.

She’d been reckless for James.

“I made a choice,” she said, turning to him, “and if it matters to you to know…I’d do it again. I let Fletcher die. And if I was faced with that choice right now, I’d choose the same choice. You could put me on a loop and I’d make the same choice every time, that’s how confident I am it was the right choice for me to make. And I’m sorry if that makes me a bad person, but I’m not sorry you’re alive. And if that means you don’t want to be around me, as friends or as anything else, then…I understand.”

James blinked.

Leaving Lily had not crossed his mind once in the twelve hours since she’d told him. The technical, legal issues of leaving aside—Sirius might have been able to sort those out, in fact—James found his imagination drew a blank at envisioning another life for himself now.

His life was with Lily and Sirius and The Pie Hole, with occasional visits from his cat, and whatever else he decided to add on top of that.

She was a killer, but more importantly, she was someone who admitted to wrongdoing and tried to atone for it. He might not have known her household chore preferences or discovered which of her habits he’d inevitably find annoying, but he knew that she was still, at her core, a good person.

She’d made her choice.

So had James.

“I like that you did it on purpose,” he said. “Doing something on accident is never as fun.”

She broke into a smile, grateful and relieved and a number of other things that James knew her well enough to read.

“Do you know,” she said, “that’s exactly what I’ve always said.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Unless it’s to the loo. Sometimes I need to do that.”

“Unacceptable. This relationship is over.”

“Pity we came so close to being compatible.”

“It’s been a pleasure knowing you.”

She smiled, and James smiled back, and all was well.

“Thank you for telling me about Fletcher,” he said. “Now we’ve got all of our literal and metaphorical skeletons out of the closet, which is perfect because I don’t think I could take any more at the moment.”

She looked down at Fletcher. “Yeah,” she said, raising a hand toward the drawer. “Are you ready to talk to him, then?”

James nodded. He couldn’t bring anyone back to life, not even Fletcher, but he could, at the very least, thank him for his unintentional sacrifice. Lily would apologize, and they would move on with their lives together.

The morgue light could hardly be called flattering on anyone, but it did not matter. Lily was stunning anywhere, her eyes kind, her mouth poised for a smile.

She’d killed, yes, but she’d given James another life.

He was not about to waste it.


End file.
